A Deep History of the Internet

The received history of the Internet is a story about technology. Brilliant engineers built the protocols. Visionary politicians funded the research. The market did the rest.

The primary record tells a different story.

The commercial internet required three things that the standard account doesn’t examine: a legislative template borrowed from the interstate highway system, a physical layer financed by a bond trader the government was simultaneously prosecuting, and a regulatory accident that handed cellular spectrum licenses to people who didn’t know they had them. None of these actors were in the same room. None of them knew they were building the same thing.

A Deep History of the Internet follows nine threads from the first packet-switched network to the utility pole at the end of your street — the physical object that has controlled broadband access for a century and will determine who gets connected next. Each thread leads to the same conclusion: the infrastructure story you know is the credited story.

This is the mechanism.

Available now in Kindle and paperback.