PAST AND FUTURE TRAJECTORIES
The enormous diversity and rapid growth of the Internet greatly complicates the formulation of a comprehensive theory of its development. Complexity often begets attempts to simplify, sometimes at the expense of mistaking selected elements and relationships for the whole phenomenon.
The Internet is no exception, as the growing number of analyses demonstrates. These are often inspired by exuberant enthusiasm for the benefits of the Internet and the fundamental transformations it enables (Tapscott and Williams, 2006; Shirky, 2010; Rifkin, 2014; Diamandis and Kotler, 2015) or by a rather gloomy view of the downsides of our increasingly Internet- and social media-driven culture (Lanier, 2013; Taylor, 2014; Ford, 2015; Keen, 2015).The two chapters of Part V provide integrative analyses of the longer-term development of the Internet, seeking to weave a multitude of considerations into a coherent picture. Chapter 26 by D. Linda Garcia analyzes the history of the Internet through an organizational field perspective. This approach examines the embeddedness of economic and market activities in institutional arrangements and in society at large. Looking at four distinct periods of Internet development (the unified telephone regime; ARPANET and the emergence of TCP/IP; the NSF era; and the increasing commercialization of the Internet) the chapter discusses the respective actor constellations and the organizational fields in which they interact. This makes it possible to construct a detailed yet overarching socio-economic account of Internet evolution.
Chapter 27 by Eli M. Noam is also linked to the broad historical developments yet focuses on the ongoing transformation of the Internet from the Internet of Science to the Internet of Entertainment. With a keen eye for the broader emerging trends and their economic drivers, the chapter provides an alternative take on the past and future of the Internet and its economics.
The chapters in the Handbook synthesize the state of knowledge as of early 2016. Given space and other constraints, some important issues could not be addressed. Topics such as the economics of the Internet in low- and middle-income countries, the economics of the Internet of Things (IoT) and the industrial Internet, and the effects of the Internet on trade will have to await a complementary volume. The Internet is also intricately related to transformations of labor markets, employment, and the global and national distribution of incomes. In all these areas important and controversial public debates are unfolding although rigorous theoretical and empirical knowledge is often lacking. These emerging questions and the numerous theoretical and empirical challenges identified in this volume suggest that Internet economics will remain a vibrant field of inquiry for the foreseeable future.
NOTES
1. Important contributions in these volumes are the chapters on the economics of the Internet backbone (Economides, 2005), the economic geography of the Internet (Greenstein, 2005) and the economics of domain names (Mueller, 2005).
2. The terms ‘next-generation network’ (NGN) and ‘all-IP’ network are often used interchangeably, referring to a network architecture built around the Internet Protocol (IP) and related protocols (e.g., TCP/IP, UDP/ IP, Ethernet/IP). These networks have a distinct vertical layered architecture in which a core transportation network supports a broad range of applications and services. They integrate communication flows from formerly separate networks, therefore allowing the retirement of legacy networks such as the voice networks. It is likely that these architectures are but one choice in a longer-term evolution of the future Internet.
3. There is no widely agreed definition of ‘broadband’. Technically speaking, broadband is the capability to transmit multiple signals and types of traffic simultaneously. As user and communication needs change, it is impossible to define ‘broadband’ once and for all.
The US National Research Council’s Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (CSTB, 2002) has delineated broadband as the download speed that supports the development of advanced applications and services, which implies it is a moving target. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) includes download speeds above 256 Kbps in its Broadband Portal and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) considers download speeds above 1.5-2.0 Mbps are broadband. The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) used 256 Kbps until 2010, when it increased the threshold for download speeds to 4 Mbps and upload speeds to 1 Mbps. In 2014 it further increased these numbers to 25 Mbps download and 3 Mbps for uploads.REFERENCES
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