The Gentrification of the Internet by Jessa Lingel

Author:Jessa Lingel
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780520344907
Publisher: University of California Press

From DIY to Monopoly: The Transformation of ISPs

The question of who controls internet access has always been political. At different times, the internet has been controlled by the military, government agencies, universities, and Big Tech. Each of these stakeholders had different visions and priorities as far as what the internet should do and who it should be for. Since the mid-2000s, the internet’s infrastructure has come under the control of major communication and media companies. Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and cell phone carriers like Verizon and AT&T operate as monopolies in huge chunks of the United States. But there was a time when ISPs were small and diverse rather than established megacompanies. As federal regulation has pulled back, the mishmash of ISPs has become much more homogenous and tightly controlled. The big players have gotten bigger, and small players have closed shop. How and why did this happen? What does the commercialization of ISPs mean for ordinary internet users? Tracing this history helps us see the flash points when access to the internet could have been different. (My retelling of this history is going to be on the short side; for more detailed accounts of ISPs and internet history, check out work by Janet Abbate, Kevin Driscoll, Victor Pickard and David Berman, and Megan Sapnar Ankerson, all of which can be found in the references.)

Let’s go back to the internet’s early days in the 1970s. For cynics and skeptics, the internet’s military roots are proof that the technology is inherently violent and controlling. It’s true that the internet wouldn’t have happened when and how it did without major investments from the U.S. military. While military investment was crucial, the internet wasn’t a top-secret, tightly controlled mission like the Manhattan Project or the atomic bomb. From the beginning, the internet involved open collaboration between the government, universities, and industry. As Shane Greenstein explains in his history of the internet, “The military did not take action [on the internet] in an isolated research laboratory. Rather the military funded several inventions, and so did other parts of the government, and so did private industry.” In the 1970s, the internet consisted of a small number of hubs operated by the military, government agencies, and universities. Each hub acted as a node in a distributed (but by today’s standards, incredibly small) network, and there were several networks operating at the same time. Because protocols were still being worked out, different networks couldn’t necessarily talk to each other. When they did talk, communication was limited and only small amounts of data could be transferred. At the time, computers were very expensive and a hassle to move, so an early goal of the internet was sharing computing power. For example, researchers from UCLA could use the internet to communicate with computers at Stanford, linking their terminals to use spare processing time. Email was also an early focus, as were e-mailing lists (aka listservs). There was no web at the time—no browsers or search engines, just computers talking to each other, exchanging messages and data.

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