As many of you know, the internet wasn’t always a series of ads bracketing content. In fact, at the beginning it wasn’t even seen as a commercial enterprise. But then, an amazing thing happened and, over the course of a decade and a half, the economic juggernaut we know today emerged.
Dr. Shane Greenstein is a Harvard economist who is intent on understanding the path taken to make this happen and the lessons that can be learned from the journey. He has written a book How the Internet Became Commercial (Princeton University Press, 2015) that details the creation and especially the privatization of the internet.
Listen as he visits and talks about the key players in the story. Not only are events and participants particular to this story discussed, the overall economic message behind the growth of key technologies is also laid out.