Ubiquitous Clicks and How It All Started

I think the press has a tendency to pick a person and paint them 10 feet tall. In fact, each of us does a little piece and I've done one thing, people add on that and then another. So you get credit for doing the whole damn thing, and that's not so.

— Paul Baran, after receiving the National Medal of Technology and Innovation

One day I watched my children use the Internet and soon found myself talking with them about the Internet in the same effusive way my immigrant grandparents talked about the wonders of electricity and the magic of transcontinental air flights. My kids just shrugged their shoulders at their father's dramatics and went back to surfing the web and playing online games.

My children cannot imagine a world without the Internet. Clicks are familiar. Hasn't it always been so?

Modern economies frequently change frontier technologies into widely used ones — from the mysterious to the unremarkable. The Internet was once exotic to all but a small set of cognoscenti, but long ago the technology spread to a majority of households and businesses. In the process of becoming ubiquitous it transformed how we work and live — changing how consumers behave, and altering how firms provide products and services.

My children are not alone in their shrugs. Most adults today could not say where the Internet came from and how its spread caused so many transformative changes. Not only does that hold for many educated adults, it also holds for many of society's thought leaders. I have met many educated economists who know a great deal about many technologies, and yet they lack any view about the general economic lessons the Internet's spread illustrates. I have met many perceptive legal scholars and policy analysts with a similar gap in their understanding.

I have also met many who do not shrug, who are curious, especially among those too young to have lived through the relevant events. Can a knowledgeable observer explain how and why the Internet deployed as it did? To what do we attribute its impact? Can those recent events yield insights that help understand technology in the future? They do not know where to go to answer their curiosity. Many key events were genuinely complex, and, at times, involved a vast ensemble of participants with distinct motives and alternative points of view. It is not obvious where to start.

This book addresses this curiosity and points it to the deeper mystery behind the surface of events. The Internet's deployment is commonly held responsible for an economic boom. Along with that boom, and in less than one generation, the names of the leading suppliers of communications changed. So too did the predominant view for forecasting how the underlying technology in communications would evolve. To the common eye all these changes occurred in less than a decade, which is extraordinarily fast by historical standards. Any of these would be rare to see in any industry. The combination — economic boom, change in leadership, alteration of the common forecast, and rapid change — is rarer still in the history of modern capitalism. These are typically associated with only the most transformative technologies, such as the steam engine, the railroad, electricity, indoor plumbing, and the automobile. Such a combination of events merits an explanation in its own right, because the history of capitalism suggests this should not happen often, if at all.

Existing explanations leave a gap, however. While many rich and wonderful histories have been written about the invention of the Internet, most focus on just invention. That yields an answer rich in technical details and incomplete in perspective. It diminishes the role of markets and government policies for markets. Writing about policy addresses some of that gap but tends to stress legal issues, regulatory debates, and changes in court decisions. It overlooks economic incentives and the behavior policy induces from suppliers and users.

To say it broadly, comparatively less writing focuses on explaining the Internet's innovation and commercialization. Innovation is the act of turning invention into something useful, while commercialization translates innovations into valuable products and services. Innovation and commercialization must connect to each other because both involve market activities, such as building the production and distribution processes to deliver a new service to customers. That summarizes the motivation behind this book and its outlook. It is not possible to explain the deeply surprising and unique aspects of these events — economic boom, change in leadership, alteration of the common forecast, and rapid change — only with technology and policy analysis. It also requires understanding how innovation commercialized, that is, how innovations became valuable as the Internet evolved within commercial markets.

The commercialization of the Internet merits attention for a related reason — it illuminates important relationships between transformation in industrial structure and innovation. How can innovation have such a transformative role in the restructuring of industries? Specifically, replacing one economic structure with another is often called the process of "creative destruction," and a crucial question of this book might be rephrased as "What role does innovation and commercialization play in creative destruction?"

This rephrased question needs a little refining because the phrase "creative destruction" has become an overused colloquial expression. To get clear on its meaning, return to its most famous user, Joseph Schumpeter. In his 1942 book Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy he describes creative destruction as an inherent property of market-based capitalist systems.

Capitalism, then, is by nature a form or method of economic change and not only never is but never can be stationary.... The fundamental impulse that sets and keeps the capitalist engine in motion comes from the new consumers' goods, the new methods of production or transportation, the new markets, the new forms of industrial organization that capitalist enterprise creates.... This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism.

Schumpeter argues that little is permanent in market economies, and such impermanence serves a useful purpose in the face of large dominant...