Underwriting the Internet

Chapter 3 The Information Superhighway

Even with the spread of personal computers and the transformation of Arpanet into the more commercially oriented Internet, traffic on the spreading network lagged because it was mainly available to scientists and engineers at various research centers and not to the public at large. Most of the users were, furthermore, civilian workers employed by the U.S. military who conducted research that the armed forces was intent on keeping secret for national security reasons. Moreover, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, signaling the death knell of Soviet communism, did not alter the surreptitious nature of these Cold War research programs that yielded few if any useful results. Final reports at any rate were duly ...