Chapter 39: Popularizing the Internet by: Janet Abbate
The Global Picture
Present: Mar. 28th!!!! * How did this worldwide expansion of the internet occur? * Though the internet originated in the US, it did not simply spread from US to the rest of the worldits global reach resulted from the convergence of many streams of network development * Internet’s ownership by the US government was an obstacle to connecting it with civilian networks in other nations * Before privatization of internet, it was difficult to expand the internet abroad by adding host sites to the US-run networks; connecting the internet to networks in other countries was much more promising * By mid 1970s, state-run networks were being built in a number of countries including Canada * In addition, there were also efforts to build multinational networks across Europe to support European Union (European Informatics Network, Euronet) * France Telecom, with its Minitel system (1982), was first phone company to offer a network service that provided content as well as communicationsallowed millions of ordinary people to access online telephone directories and other commercial land recreational services * Including online pornography, a popular attraction that received much public comment and that the US-government-run Internet could not have openly supported * One of world’s leading sites for computer networking was CERN, the European laboratory for particle physics * Networks outside the US had few links to the internet while it was under military control. But when the National Science Foundation set up its civilian NSFNET, foreign networks were able to establish connections to it, and thus to gain access to the rest of the Internet * Canada and France had connected their networks to the NSFNET by mid 1988 * By Jan. 1990, there were