Commercialization of the Internet: The Interaction of Public Policy and Private Actions,” in

seminar participants for comments. I am particularly grateful to Zvi Griliches who encouraged this research when it was at a formative stage. All remaining errors are mine alone. Abstract Why did commercialization of the Internet go so well? This paper examines events in the Internet access market as a window on this broad question. The study emphasizes four themes. First, commercializing Internet access did not give rise to many of the anticipated technical and operational challenges. Entrepreneurs quickly learned that the Internet access business was commercially feasible. Second, Internet access was malleable as a technology and as an economic unit. Third, privatization fostered attempts to adapt the technology in new uses, new locations, new market settings, new applications and in conjunction with other lines of business. These went beyond what anyone would have forecast by examining the uses for the technology prior to 1992. Fourth, and not trivially, the NSF was lucky in one specific sense. The Internet access industry commercialized at a propitious moment, at the same time as the growth of an enormous new technological opportunity, the World Wide Web. As it turned out, the Web thrived under market-oriented, decentralized and independent decision making. The paper draws lessons for policies governing the commercialization of other government managed technologies and for the Internet access market moving forward. 1 Motivation The "commercialization of the Internet" is shorthand for three nearly simultaneous events: the removal of restrictions by the National Science Foundation (NSF) over use of the Internet for commercial purposes, the browser wars initiated by the founding of Netscape, and the rapid entry of tens of thousands of firms into commercial ventures using technologies which employ the suite of TCP/IP standards. These events culminated years of work at NSF to transfer the Internet into commercial hands from its exclusive use for research activity in government funded laboratories and universities. Sufficient time has passed to begin to evaluate how the market performed after commercialization. Such an evaluation is worth doing. Actual events have surpassed the forecasts of the most optimistic managers at NSF. Was this due to mere good fortune or something systematic whose lessons illuminate the market today? Other government managed technologies usually face vexing technical and commercial challenges that prevent the technology from diffusing quickly, if at all. Can we draw lessons from this episode for the commercialization of other government managed technologies? In that spirit, this paper examines the Internet access market and one set of actors, Internet Service Provides (ISPs). ISPs provide Internet access for most of the households and business users in the country (NTIA, 1999), usually for a fee or, more recently, in exchange for advertising. Depending on the user facilities, whether it is a business or personal residence, access can involve dial-up to a local number or 1-800 number at different speeds, or direct access to the user's server employing one of several high-speed access technologies. The largest ISP in the United States today is America-On-Line, to which approximately half the households in the US subscribe. There also are many national ISPs with recognizable names, such as AT&T Worldnet, MCI WorldCom/UUNet, Mindspring/Earthlink, and PSINet, as well as thousands of smaller regional ISPs. The Internet access market is a good case to examine. Facilities for similar activity existed prior to commercialization, but there was reason to expect a problematic migration into commercial use. This activity 2 appeared to possess idiosyncratic technical features and uneconomic operational procedures which made it unsuitable in other settings. The Internet's exclusive use by academics and researchers fostered cautious predictions that unanticipated problems would abound and commercial demand might not materialize. In sharp contrast to cautious expectations, however, the ISP market displayed three extraordinary features. For one, this market grew rapidly, attracting thousands of entrants and many users, quickly achieving mass-market status. Second, firms offering this service became nearly geographically pervasive, a diffusion pattern rarely found in new infrastructure markets. And third, firms did not settle on a standard menu of services to offer, indicative of new commercial opportunities and also a lack of consensus about the optimal business model for this opportunity. Aside from defying expectations, all three traits --rapid growth, geographic pervasiveness and the absence of settlement --do not inherently go together in most markets. The presence of restructuring should have interfered with rapid growth and geographic expansion. So explaining this market experience is also interesting in its own right. What happened to make commercialization go so well? This paper's examination reveals four themes. First, commercialization did not give rise to many of the anticipated technical and operational challenges. Entrepreneurs quickly learned that the Internet access business was commercially feasible. This happened for a variety of economic reasons. ISPs began offering commercial service after making only incremental changes to familiar operating procedures borrowed from the academic setting. It was technically easy to collect revenue at what used to be the gateway functions of academic modem pools. Moreover, the academic model of Internet access migrated into commercial operation without any additional new equipment suppliers. Second, Internet access was malleable as a technology and as an economic unit. This is because the foundation for Internet inter-connectivity, TCP/IP, is not a single invention, diffusing across time and space without changing form. Instead, it is embedded in equipment which uses a suite of communication technologies, protocols and standards for networking between computers. This technology obtains economic value in combination with complementary invention, investment and equipment. While commercialization did 3 give rise to restructuring of Internet access to suit commercial users, the restructuring did not stand in the way of diffusion, nor interfere with the initial growth of demand. Third, privatizing Internet access fostered customizing Internet access technology to a wide variety of locations, circumstances and users. As it turned out, the predominant business model was feasible at small scale and, thus, at low levels of demand. This meant that the technology was commercially viable at low densities of population, whether or not it was part of a national branded service or a local geographically Fourth, and not trivially, the NSF was lucky in a particular sense of the word. It enabled the commercialization of the Internet access industry at a propitious moment, at the same time as the growth of an enormous new technological opportunity, the World Wide Web. This invention motivated further experimentation to take advantage of the new opportunity, which, as it turned out, thrived under marketoriented and decentralized decision making. The paper first develop these themes. Then it describes recent experience. It ends by discussing how these themes continue to resonate today. Challenges during technology transfer: an overview Conventional approaches to technological development led most observers in 1992 to be cautious about the commercialization of the Internet. To understand how this prediction went awry, it is important to understand its foundations. For example, military users frequently require electronic components to meet specifications that suit 6 the component to battle conditions. Extensive technical progress is needed to tailor a product design to meet these requirements. Yet, and this is difficult to anticipate prior to commercialization, an additional amount of invention is often needed to bring such a product design and to bring its manufacturing to a price/point with features that meet more cost-conscious or less technically stringent commercial requirements. Commercial challenges arise when commercial markets require substantial adaptation of operation and business processes in order to put technologies into use. In other words, government users or users in a research environment often tolerate operational processes that do not translate profitably to commercial environments. After a technology transfers out of government sponsorship, it may not be clear how to balance costs and revenues for technologies that had developed under settings with substantial subsidies underwriting losses, and research goals justifying expenditures. Hence, many government managed technologies require considerable experimentation with business models before they begin to grow, if they grow at all. For example, the supersonic transport actually met its engineering targets, but still failed to satisfy basic operational economics in most settings. Being technically sleek was insufficient to attract enough interest to generate the revenue which covered operating costs on any but a small set of routes. No amount of operational innovations and marketing campaigns were able to overcome these commercial problems. New technologies are also vulnerable to structural challenges that impede pathways to commercialization. Commercial and structural challenges are not necessarily distinct, though the latter are typically more complex. Structural challenges are those which require change to the bundle of services offered, change to the boundary of the firms offering or using the new technology, or dramatic change to the operational structure of the service organization. These challenges arise because technologies developed under government auspices may presume implementation at a particular scale or with a set of technical standards, but require a different set of organizational arrangements to support commercial applications. For example, while many organizations provided the technical advances necessary for scientific 7 computing in academic settings during the 1950s, very few of these same firms migrated into supporting large customer bases among business users. As it turned out, the required changes were too dramatic for many companies to make. The structure of the support and sales organization were very different, and so too were the product designs. Of course, the few who successfully made the transition to commercial users, such as IBM, did quite well, but doing so required overcoming considerable obstacles. In summary, conventional analysis forecasts that migrating Internet access into commercial use would engender technical, commercial and structural challenges. Why did the migration proceed so different than expected? The absence of challenge in the Internet Access industry An ISP is a commercial firm who provides access, maintains it for a fee and develop related applications as users require. While sometimes this is all they do, with business users they often do much more. Sometimes ISPs do simple things such as filtering. Sometimes it involves managing and designing email accounts, data-bases and web pages. Some ISPs label this activity consulting and charge for it separately; others do not consider it distinct from the normal operation of the Internet access services. On the surface the record of achievement for ISPs is quite remarkable. Most recent surveys show that no more than 10 percent of US households get their Internet access from university-sponsored Internet access providers, the predominant provider of such access prior to commercialization. Today almost all users go to a commercial providers By the end of the century the ISP market had obtained a remarkable structure. One firm, America On-line, provided access to close to half the households in the US market, while several score of other ISPs provided access to millions of households and businesses on a nationwide basis. Thousands of ISPs also 8 provided access for limited geographic areas, such as one city or region. Such small ISPs accounted for roughly a quarter of household use and another fraction of business use. Technical challenges did not get in the way The Internet access market did suffer from some technical challenges, but not enough to prevent rapid diffusion. Commercialization induced considerable technical innovation in complementary inventive activities. Much of this innovative activity became associated with developing new applications for existing users and new users. It is often forgotten that when the electronic commerce first developed based on TCP/IP standards, it was relatively mature in some applications, such as e-mail and file transfers, which were the most popular applications (these programs continue to be the most popular today, NTIA [1999]). To be sure, TCP/IP based programs were weak in others areas, such as commercial data base and software applications for business use, but those uses did not necessarily have to come immediately. The invention of the World Wide Web in the early 1990s further stretched the possibilities for potential applications and highlighted these weaknesses. More important for the initial diffusion, little technical invention was required for commercial vendors to put this technology into initial mainstream use. Academic modem pools and computing centers tended to use technologies similar to their civilian counterparts --such as bulletin board operators --while buying most equipment from commercial suppliers. Moving this activity into the mainstream commercial sector did not necessitate building a whole new Internet equipment industry; it was already there, supplying goods and services to the universities and to home PC users. Similarly, much of the software continued to be usefuli.e., Unix systems, the gate-keeping software, and the basic communication protocols. Indeed, every version of Unix software had been TPC/IP compatible for many years due to Department of Defense requirements. A simple commercial operation only needed to add a billing component to the gate-keeping software to turn an academic modem pool into a rudimentary commercial operation. 9 Technical information about these operations was easy to obtain if one had sufficient technical background; a BA in basic electrical engineering or computer science was far more than adequate. Many IS

Relationship between karstification and burial dolomitization in Permian platform carbonates (Lower Khuff - Oman)

Large breccia fabrics associated with karst constitute an important structure in massive limestone successions. The dimensions and shapes of breccia structures are controlled by the initial fracture pattern of the limestone and preferential pathways of the karstifying fluids, but subsequently breccia fabrics can also govern the migration of later fluids. Therefore, breccias are highly relevant features to capture for reservoir characterisation. Outcrop analogues for Lower Khuff units in the Middle East present in the Central Oman Mountains reveal brecciated fabrics up to 10’s of meters in diameter. These brecciated units are closely associated with dolomite bodies of late diagenetic origin. Based on an integrated set of data, the breccias are interpreted as collapsed karst cavities either formed by meteoric or hypogenic fluids. The exact origin of the fluids could not be constrained due to an overprint by later dolomitizing fluids. Based on the composition of the clasts and matrix in the breccias, two dolomitization events are interpreted to have affected the succession, one prior to (early diagenetic [ED] dolomite) and one after brecciation (late diagenetic [DT2] dolomite). Dolomite of shallow burial origin (ED dolomite) was only observed as clasts within breccia and is much more frequent than late diagenetic (medium to deep burial) dolomite clasts. Thus, the timing of the brecciation and collapse is assumed to postdate shallow burial early diagenetic dolomitization. Late diagenetic replacive dolomite (DT2 dolomite) forms 90% of the matrix in the breccia fabrics with the exception of a small area that was not affected by dolomitization, but is rarely present as clasts. Stable isotope measurements [δ18O: − 2.5‰ to − 6‰ VPDB and δ13C: 2.9‰ to 4.8‰ VPDB] suggest a burial origin for the late diagenetic dolomite potentially with the participation of hydrothermal fluids. The dolomitized matrix indicates a migration of late dolomitizing fluids subsequent to or postdating the collapse of the karstic cavities. Thus, early karstification processes seem to have played a big role in controlling subsequent loci of late dolomitization in the Oman Mountains, and potentially in other similar settings elsewhere

Reframing gender and feminist knowledge construction in marketing and consumer research: missing feminisms and the case of men and masculinities

Gender has been theorised and studied in many ways and across different disciplines. Although a number of these theorisations have been recognised and adopted in marketing and consumer research, the significance of feminism in knowledge construction has largely remained what we would call ‘unfinished’. Based on a critical reframing of gender research in marketing and consumer research, in dialogue with feminist theory, this article offers theoretical and practical suggestions for how to reinvigorate these research efforts. The analysis highlights dominant theorisations of gender, relating to gender as variable, difference and role; as fundamental difference and structuring; and as cultural and identity constructions. This reframing emphasises various neglected or ‘missing feminisms’, including queer theory; critical race, intersectional and transnational feminisms; material-discursive feminism; and critical studies on men and masculinities. A more detailed discussion of the latter, as a relatively new, growing and politically contentious area, is further developed to highlight more specifically which feminist and gender theories are mainly in use in marketing and consumer research and which are little or not used. In the light of this, it is argued that marketing and related disciplines have thus far largely neglected several key contemporary gender and feminist theorisations, particularly those that centre on gender power relations. The potential impact of these theoretical frames on transdisciplinary studies in marketing and consumer research and research agenda(s) is discussed

The pragmatic-semiotic construction of male identities in contemporary advertising of male grooming products

[EN] This article aims to unveil how male identities are constructed in a corpus of male toiletry TV ads through a pragmatic and multimodal analysis of a set of implicit assumptions conveyed about the male participants in the ads. The validity of these assumptions is first empirically tested with a group of 10 male informants and then those implied meanings are bundled into thematic cores for their qualitative and quantitative description. Findings reveal that these ads still rely on stereotypical constructs and traditional discourses of what it takes to be a man. For example, men are invited to consume grooming products but reminded to do it the men's way. Men are also reminded of their sexual power to seduce and attract women with the aid of the product. Likewise, by portraying male ad personae in traditional manly activities while emphasizing their toughness and body strength, or their resourcefulness when faced with challenging situations, the ads portray a rather skewed view of contemporary men, which fails to take into account the myriad roles a modern man can play in contemporary societies.I am really grateful to the reviewers for their insightful comments and also to the editor of the journal.Saz Rubio, MMD. (2019). The pragmatic-semiotic construction of male identities in contemporary advertising of male grooming products. Discourse & Communication. 13(2):192-227. https://doi.org/10.1177/1750481318817621S192227132Alexander, S. M. (2003). Stylish Hard Bodies: Branded Masculinity in Men’s Health Magazine. Sociological Perspectives, 46(4), 535-554. doi:10.1525/sop.2003.46.4.535Attwood, F. (2005). ‘Tits and ass and porn and fighting’. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 8(1), 83-100. doi:10.1177/1367877905050165Rubio, M. D. 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Polymorphisms of the XRCC1, XRCC3 and XPD genes and risk of colorectal adenoma and carcinoma, in a Norwegian cohort: a case control study

BACKGROUND: Genetic polymorphisms in DNA repair genes may influence individual variation in DNA repair capacity, which may be associated with risk of developing cancer. For colorectal cancer the importance of mutations in mismatch repair genes has been extensively documented. Less is known about other DNA repair pathways in colorectal carcinogenesis. In this study we have focused on the XRCC1, XRCC3 and XPD genes, involved in base excision repair, homologous recombinational repair and nucleotide excision repair, respectively. METHODS: We used a case-control study design (157 carcinomas, 983 adenomas and 399 controls) to test the association between five polymorphisms in these DNA repair genes (XRCC1 Arg(194)Trp, Arg(280)His, Arg(399)Gln, XRCC3 Thr(241)Met and XPD Lys(751)Gln), and risk of colorectal adenomas and carcinomas in a Norwegian cohort. Odds ratio (OR) and 95% confidence interval (95% CI) were estimated by binary logistic regression model adjusting for age, gender, cigarette smoking and alcohol consumption. RESULTS: The XRCC1 280His allele was associated with an increased risk of adenomas (OR 2.30, 95% CI 1.19–4.46). The XRCC1 399Gln allele was associated with a reduction of risk of high-risk adenomas (OR 0.62, 95% CI 0.41–0.96). Carriers of the variant XPD 751Gln allele had an increased risk of low-risk adenomas (OR 1.40, 95% CI 1.03–1.89), while no association was found with risk of carcinomas. CONCLUSION: Our results suggest an increased risk for advanced colorectal neoplasia in individuals with the XRCC1 Arg(280)His polymorphism and a reduced risk associated with the XRCC1 Arg(399)Gln polymorphism. Interestingly, individuals with the XPD Lys(751)Gln polymorphism had an increased risk of low-risk adenomas. This may suggest a role in regression of adenomas

A mouse model of human mucopolysaccharidosis IX exhibits osteoarthritis

Hyaluronidases are endoglycosidases that hydrolyze hyaluronan (HA), an abundant component of the extracellular matrix of vertebrate connective tissues. Six human hyaluronidase-related genes have been identified to date. Mutations in one of these genes cause a deficiency of hyaluronidase 1 (HYAL1) resulting in a lysosomal storage disorder, mucopolysaccharidosis (MPS) IX. We have characterized a mouse model of MPS IX and compared its phenotype with the human disease. The targeted Hyal1 allele in this model had a neomycin resistance cassette in exon 2 that replaced 753 bp of the coding region containing the predicted enzyme active site. As a result, Hyal1-/- animals had no detectable wild-type Hyal1 transcript, protein or serum activity. Hyal1 null animals were viable, fertile and showed no gross abnormalities at 1 year and 8 months of age. Histological studies of the knee joint showed a loss of proteoglycans occurring as early as 3 months that progressed with age. An increased number of chondrocytes displaying intense pericellular and/or cytoplasmic HA staining were detected in the epiphyseal and articular cartilage of null mice, demonstrating an accumulation of HA. Elevations of HA were not detected in the serum or non-skeletal tissues, indicating that osteoarthritis is the key disease feature in a Hyal1 deficiency. Hyal3 expression was elevated in Hyal1 null mice, suggesting that Hyal3 may compensate in HA degradation in non-skeletal tissues. Overall, the murine MPS IX model displays the key features of the human disease.Dianna C. Martin, Vasantha Atmuri, Richard J. Hemming, Judith Farley, John S. Mort, Sharon Byers, Sabine Hombach-Klonisch, Robert Stern and Barbara L. Triggs-Rain