How Internet Got Privatized in US

choi

Marc Levinson, Privatizing the Superhighway. In most countries, control over the Internet was handed to the state telephone monopoly. In the US, with AT&T gone, the market took over. Wall Street Journal, Nov 24, 2015
www.wsj.com/articles/privatizing-the-superhighway-1448325429
(book review on Shane Greenstein, How the Internet became Commercial; Innovation, privatization, and the birth of a new network. Princeton University Press, 2015)

Quote:

"The revival of America’s big cities is one of the most unexpected economic developments of the 21st century. * * * What caused this astounding turnaround? One answer, Shane Greenstein suggests, may be the Internet. [It is a fact all right. But I still do not understand his explanation. Why can’t Internet tech people live in suburbs and work in the cities, as in previous generations?]

“The link between urban revival and the spread of the Internet is only one of the fascinating nuggets in Mr Greenstein’s ‘How the Internet Became Commercial.’ An economist at Harvard Business School, Mr. Greenstein treats the Internet as a phenomenon susceptible to careful study rather than a unique development that defies economic principles. His rich book thus goes far to explain why the Internet developed as it did—and why choices made by the US government [its decisions that encouraged competition] proved critical to its rapid maturation.

“In the early 1990s, the National Science Foundation was trying to figure out what to do with the network known as NSFNET, which was used mainly for communication among researchers. * * * The government, he notes, had no master plan. “The shape, speed, growth, and use of the commercial Internet after 1995 were not foreseen within the government circles responsible for its birth,’ Mr Greenstein writes. But a series of policy decisions over two decades ensured that Internet access would be a competitive business, with service providers and end users free to use the hardware and software of their choice, with nobody in charge. That approach allowed what telecom geeks call ‘innovation from the edges,’ as companies found unexpected ways to make money from the Internet.