ABSTRACT
The wide variety of activities on the Internet has been spawned by creative businesses offering many types of social, recreational, hobby, communications, and business functions that work well and scale globally. In the early days of the Internet, it was possible to categorize service providers by the types of online activities offered, but soon “one-stop shopping” rms like America Online (AOL) created services with many types of interactions. Many of those online still use services like AOL, Microsoft’s MSN, Yahoo!, and major telecommunications rms’ portals for a wide variety of functions, such as Internet access, email, social networking, news, chat, instant messaging, searching, and others. Mobile devices increasingly provide a widening variety of online activities and applications. Today, the role of the commercial Internet portal in connecting users is to provide multiple, bundled services, often with applications allowing more and more integrated and interconnected options. Examples include geolocation, nding nearby sites and people, updating a circle of “friends,” interlacing multiple email, IM, and “tweet” contact lists and postings, evaluating local retailers, and updating agendas. As a facilitator of the human interactions enabled by the multifaceted network, the telecommunications company, ISP, interconnected service providers, and hosts must understand the
market forces, predominant personal views, laws, and ethical limitations of the activities riding their wavelengths.
