The Growth and Development of the Internet in the United States

Rarely does a new technology emerge that galvanizes a dramatic rethinking of the nature of commerce. The Internet is such a technology. At this early stage, it is difficult to appreciate fully the importance of the Internet, but some speculate it might be as momentous as the arrival of the telegraph (Cohen, Delurg, and Sysmar 2000; Standage 1999). Radically new communication technologies such as the Internet have multiple applications and often become ubiquitous. As such, the adoption, diffusion, and development of this new technology provide an especially penetrating view of how different national innovation systems have responded to and shaped the commercial possibilities inherent in the Internet. Of course, such an assessment for an economy as large as that of the United States is difficult. It is further complicated by the peculiar way in which communications technologies permeate and facilitate connections and relationships. Often the action of such technologies is imperceptible to most of the actors involved and even to aggregate statistics; for example, better information transfer between customers and suppliers is not manifested in the finished good, though it is embodied in the good in terms of lower cost and/or higher quality. Given the diffuse nature and the speed of the Internet's evolution, any analysis can only be tentative.