The NSFNET is the Internet

An important intermediary in the transition of the military’s ARPANET into the commercial Internet was the National Science Foundation’s NSFNET. The NSFNET adopted TCP/IP and required all connecting nodes to use them as well compliant network technology, mainly built by a small California startup company called Cisco. With government funding for advanced scientific and military […]

Statecraft and the First E-Commerce Administration

One of techno-economic history’s most fascinating questions will deal with the stock market advances and technology developments during the 1990s. The eight years of the Clinton-Gore administration saw the proliferation of the Internet and telecommunications sectors. The Internet, a product of the Cold War, became a tool of global commerce. The Presidential election of 1992 […]

The Telecom Crash of 2002

One of the economic history’s most fascinating questions will deal with the stock market advances during the eight Clinton-Gore years, especially those in the Internet and telecommunications sectors. During their tenure in the 1990s the stock markets boomed, and the investments created the lowest unemployment in years as well as contributed significantly to the budget […]

The Transformation of Telecom to Global IP, GATT to GATS

In a previous post I wrote about how the U.S. Clinton-Gore administration used the notion of the Global Information Infrastructure (GII) to push for the adoption of Internet protocols through multilateral trade negotiations and telecom privatization. Below I address how the inclusion of services in trade talks helped facilitate the international spread of the Internet […]