ABSTRACT
No one could have predicted that the Defense Department’s commission-ing of a secure high-speed communication network for military use would ‘spin off’ into the World Wide Web of the contemporary Internet. While the Defense Department achieved its goal, that achievement has been dwarfed by the scale of the social, economic and political consequences of the way the Internet has developed. From daily commercial transactions to downloads of streaming videos, from distance learning to search engines that can mine the Library of Congress, from e-mail to news media clips to a dominant
feature of the lives of so many that, on a worldwide scale, if banks or hotels or restaurants do not have their own websites, they are consigned to outlier
status in the backwaters of an integrated global network. No one could have predicted the speed and penetration of these developments. But, if we had stopped and thought about it, we might have expected dramatic changes if the known synergistic ingredients to the infrastructure were to be placed on to the conveyor belt of modern life.
