tandfonline.com – Three kinds of demand pull for the ARPANET into the Internet

Abstract

This essay examines how the US government intelligence community (IC) as well as the public and commercial sectors contributed demand-pull, in different ways, for an unregulated, privatized Internet. Demand-pull entails more demand than supply, or a shortage in supply (such as a shortage in networks and thus a demand-pull for them). It is argued that an excessive supply of Cold War era IC spy data, which required high-speed data processing, incentivized ARPANET expansion. In the public sector, people wanted expanded networks for personal computing and in the commercial sector there was demand-pull for unregulated networks that bootlegged and gifted PROMIS derived software could be harnessed to. The IC demand pulled for their own cloned and separate networks, while the public demand pulled for their own networks and commercial interests demand pulled for unregulated, privatized and expanded networks. Together these different demand-pull scenarios incentivized a speedy and unchallenged privatization of an Internet that was neither owned nor regulated by any one government or company.