The (un)Economic Internet?

The Internet Economics track will address how economic and policy issues relate to the emergence of the Internet as critical infrastructure. Here, the authors provide a historical overview of internetworking, identifying key transitions that have contributed to the Internet's development and penetration. Its core architecture wasn't designed to serve as critical communications infrastructure for society; rather, the infrastructure developed far beyond the expectations of the original funding agencies, architects, developers, and early users. The incongruence between the Internet's underlying architecture and society's current use and expectations of it means we can no longer study Internet technology in isolation from the political and economic context in which it is deployed.