ABSTRACT
In the early 1990s, the development and use of what was beginning to be called ‘cyberspace’ held two promises. There was potential for a global infrastructure of information exchange as a result of technological innovation and continuing US political leadership. The rapid development of ICT products and services in the 1990s was stimulated by the invention of the World Wide Web (WWW), enabled by the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), by Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist at CERN, the European particle-physics laboratory in Switzerland. Successive US policies fostered the emergence of the commercial internet. After the ARPANET was decommissioned, in 1990, the government designated the National Science Foundation (NSF) as the primary provider of data-routing services. The 1994 International Telecommunication Union (ITU) conference declaration recognised telecommunications as an essential component of political, economic, social and cultural development, fuelling rapidly transforming local, national and international societies as well as the global information society and economy.
