The Political History of the Internet in the United States

Undergraduate

This is a history of the political, legislative and regulatory decisions that created the commercial internet in the United States. Who made the internet the way it is? Why? To serve whose interests? What system did the internet replace? As it evolved, what happened by design and what did politicians fail to imagine? Rather than focusing on Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and engineers, this course seeks to answer those questions from the vantage of the lawmakers, politicians and regulators who made active decisions that both constrained and enabled the development of the internet, and its evolution from a Defense Department project to a “immaculately conceived” commercial marketplace, as Al Gore described it at the time. The goal of this course is to understand the commercial internet as something that was enabled in response to the political events of the fifties, sixties and seventies, and over a century of regulatory precedent, with unanticipated consequences for our own time. HU Th 1:30pm-3:25pm