IS FACEBOOK TODAY’S COMPUSERVE?
giving further legitimacy to Internet commerce. But these organizations were designed in a time of centralized control. Their model of charging consumers was based on usage. Compuserve stuck with that old model and as late as 1994 they still charged 15 cents per Internet e-mail received — including for spam. POWER SHIFTS The shift to more distributed production models, where content was produced by people outside of the organization, was a new world. Many, including Compuserve and MCI, eventually lost power to be replaced
This started to legitimize commercial uses of the Internet for the general public, but was not without its controversies at the time. Overall, the relays announcement helped give legitimacy and publicity to the emerging public commercial Internet. It started the path to weakening the centralized power of Compuserve and MCI. At first, the cutting-edge announcement by Compuserve and MCI gave them an advantage. It also gave them the opportunity to shape some of the initial public conceptions of the public Internet. Traditional industries started coming online,
Max Roser Historical Internet users by world region since 1990.
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August 2019
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