The Commercialization of the Internet

The introduction of the World Wide Web and the first web browsers, Mosaic and Netscape, in the 1990s helped transform the Internet into a mass medium. Soon after these developments, the Internet quickly became commercialized, leading to battles between corporations vying to attract the most users, and others who wished to preserve the original public, nonprofit nature of the Net.

The World Begins to Browse

“When search first started, if you searched for something and you found it, it was a miracle. Now, if you don’t get exactly what you want in the first three results, something is wrong.”

UDI MANBER, GOOGLE ENGINEER, 2007

Prior to the 1990s, most of the Internet’s traffic was for e-mail, file transfers, and remote access of computer databases. The World Wide Web (WWW) (or the Web) changed all of that. Developed in the late 1980s by software engineer Tim Berners-Lee at the CERN particle physics lab in Switzerland to help scientists better collaborate, the Web was initially a text data-linking system that allowed computer-accessed information to associate with, or link to, other information no matter where it was on the Internet. Known as hypertext, this data-linking feature of the Web was a breakthrough for those attempting to use the Internet. HTML (hypertext markup language), the written code that creates Web pages and links, is a language that all computers can read, so computers with different operating systems, such as Windows or Macintosh, can communicate easily. The Web and HTML allow information to be organized in an easy-to-use nonlinear manner, making way for the next step in using the Internet.

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WEB BROWSERS The GUI (graphical user interface) of the World Wide Web changed overnight with the release of Mosaic in 1993. As the first popular Web browser, Mosaic unleashed the multimedia potential of the Internet. Mosaic was the inspiration for the commercial browser Netscape, which was released in 1994.

The release of Web browsers—the software packages that help users navigate the Web—brought the Web to mass audiences. In 1993, computer programmers led by Marc Andreessen at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign released Mosaic, the first window-based browser to load text and graphics together in a magazine-like layout, with attractive fonts and easy-to-use back, forward, home, and bookmark buttons at the top. In 1994, Andreessen joined investors in California’s Silicon Valley to introduce a commercial browser, Netscape. As USA Today wrote that year, this “new way to travel the Internet, the World Wide Web,” was “the latest rage among Net aficionados.”3 The Web soon became everyone else’s rage, too, as universities and businesses, and later home users, got connected.

As the Web became the most popular part of the Internet, many thought that the key to commercial success on the Net would be through a Web browser. In 1995, Microsoft released its own Web browser, Internet Explorer; and within a few years, Internet Explorer—strategically bundled with Microsoft operating system software—overtook Netscape as the most popular Web browser. Today, Firefox and Google’s Chrome are the top browsers, with Internet Explorer, Apple’s Safari, and Opera as the leading alternatives.

Users Link In through Telephone and Cable Wires

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In the first decades of the Internet, most people connected to “cyberspace” through telephone wires. AOL (formerly America Online) began connecting millions of home users in 1985 to its proprietary Web system through dial-up access, and quickly became the United States’ top Internet service provider (ISP). AOL’s success was so great that by 2001, the Internet startup bought the world’s largest media company, Time Warner—a deal that shocked the industry and signaled the Internet’s economic significance as a vehicle for media content. As broadband connections, which can quickly download multimedia content, became more available (about 66 percent of all American households had such connections by 2012), users moved away from the slower telephone dial-up ISP service (AOL’s main service) to high-speed service from cable, telephone, or satellite companies.4 By 2007, both AT&T (offering DSL and cable broadband) and Comcast (cable broadband) surpassed AOL in numbers of customers. Today, other major ISPs include Verizon, Time Warner Cable, CenturyLink, Charter, and Cox. These are accompanied by hundreds of local services, many offered by regional telephone and cable companies that compete to provide consumers with access to the Internet.

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People Embrace Digital Communication

“The rituals of social media, it seems, make status-seekers and exhibitionists of us all.”

ROSS DOUTHAT, NEW YORK TIMES, 2011

In digital communication, an image, a text, or a sound is converted into electronic signals represented as a series of binary numbers—ones and zeros—which are then reassembled as a precise reproduction of an image, a text, or a sound. Digital signals operate as pieces, or bits (from BInary digiTS), of information representing two values, such as yes/no, on/off, or 0/1. For example, a typical compact disc track uses a binary code system in which zeros are microscopic pits in the surface of the disc and ones are represented on the unpitted surface. Used in various combinations, these digital codes can duplicate, store, and play back the most complex kinds of media content.

In the early days of e-mail, the news media constantly marveled at the immediacy of this new form of communication. Describing a man from Long Island e-mailing a colleague on the Galapagos Islands, the New York Times wrote in 1994 that his “magical new mailbox is inside his personal computer at his home, and his correspondence with the Galapagos now travels at the speed of electricity over the global computer network known as the Internet.”5 Other news media accounts worried about the brevity of e-mail interchanges, the loss of the art of letter writing, and the need for “netiquette,” the manners of cyberspace. An e-mail sent by President Clinton in 1994 “COMPOSED ENTIRELY OF CAPITAL LETTERS” was reported as a “cardinal breach of netiquette.”6

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INSTANT MESSAGING With early IM services like AOL Instant Messenger, users could bounce from chat room to chat room, sporting screen names that were often comical or ambiguous. Today, instant messaging is one of the principal modes of communication in professional settings.

E-mail was one of the earliest services of the Internet, and people typically used the e-mail services connected to their ISPs before major Web corporations such as Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft (Hotmail) began to offer free Web-based e-mail accounts to draw users to their sites; each now has millions of users. Today, all of the top e-mail services also include advertisements in their users’ e-mail messages, one of the costs of the “free” e-mail accounts. Google’s Gmail goes one step further by scanning messages to dynamically match a relevant ad to the text each time an e-mail message is opened. Such targeted advertising has become a hallmark feature of the Internet.

As with e-mail, instant messaging, or IM, offered both a fascinating and troubling new part of media culture in the late 1990s. Teenagers were among the first to gravitate to IM and chat rooms, develop multitasking skills so they could IM multiple friends simultaneously, and discover that sometimes it was easier talking with friends online than face to face. In the early days of IM, there were concerns over the supposed lack of substance in IM conversations (was telephone dialogue any different?), and from teens talking to unseen strangers who might be asking them “What are you wearing?”7 But as businesses found ways to integrate IM into the office culture, and as IM became as integrated as e-mail into our everyday lives, these worries subsided.

IM remains the easiest way to communicate over the Internet in real time and has become increasingly popular as a smartphone and tablet app, with free IM services supplanting costly text messages. Major IM services—many with voice and video chat capabilities—include AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), Microsoft’s Messenger, Yahoo!’s Messenger, Apple’s iChat, Skype (owned by eBay), Gmail’s Chat, and Facebook Chat. IM users fill out detailed profiles when signing up for the service, providing advertisers with multiple ways to target them as they chat with their friends.

Search Engines Organize the Web

As the number of Web sites on the Internet quickly expanded, companies seized the opportunity to provide ways to navigate this vast amount of information by providing directories and search engines. One of the more popular search engines, Yahoo!, began as a directory. In 1994, Stanford University graduate students Jerry Yang and David Filo created a Web page—”Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web”—to organize their favorite Web sites, first into categories, then into more and more subcategories as the Web grew. At that point, the entire World Wide Web was almost manageable, with only about twenty-two thousand Web sites. (By 2008, Google announced it had indexed more than one trillion Web pages, up from one billion in 2000.) The guide made a lot of sense to other people, and soon enough Yang and Filo renamed it the more memorable “Yahoo!”

Eventually, though, having employees catalog individual Web sites became impractical. Search engines offer a more automated route to finding content by allowing users to enter key words or queries to locate related Web pages. Search engines are built on mathematic algorithms, and the earliest ones directed them to search the entire Web and look for the number of times a key word showed up on a page. Soon search results were corrupted by Web sites that tried to trick search engines in order to get ranked higher on the results list. One common trick was to embed a popular search term in the page, often typed over and over again in the tiniest font possible and in the same color as the site’s background. Although users didn’t see the word, the search engines did, and they ranked the page higher.

Google, released in 1998, became a major success because it introduced a new algorithm that mathematically ranked a page’s “popularity” on the basis of how many other pages linked to it. Users immediately recognized Google’s algorithm as an improvement, and it became the favorite search engine almost overnight. Google also moved to maintain its search dominance with its Google Voice Search and Google Goggles apps, which allow smartphone users to conduct searches by voicing search terms or by taking a photo. By 2013, Google’s market share accounted for 66.9 percent of searches in the United States, while Microsoft’s Bing claimed about 18 percent and Yahoo!’s share was 11.3 percent.8