THE INTERNET ENABLES POTENTIAL SMALL ENTREPRENEURS TO EFFICIENTLY SEEK BUSINESS OPPORTUNITIES WITH LOW ENTRY BARRIERS AND POTENTIALLY LARGE MARKETS

Commercial interest in the Internet is high, for both small and large businesses, and continues to grow. In August 1994, the Commercial Sites Index had several hundred listings of businesses on the Web. Eighteen months later, there were more than 22,000 businesses on the Web. Internet Solutions (a Web site that provides statistics on the Internet) estimated that, on February 12, 1996, there were more than 50 million people with some form of access to the Internet and more than 400,000 Web sites. a fourfold increase in just six months (Ives, 1996). Whereas the Internet in the early 1980s consisted of only about 25 linked networks, it had grown by 1995 to include more than 44,000 networks extending to 160 countries and including 26,000 registered commercial entities. Somewhere between 40 million and 50 million computers were connected to Internet hosts in 1995, and that number was growing by an estimated 10 % to 20 % per month (Spar, 1996). To illustrate the magnitude of the Internet growth in the past few years, Table I provides statistics on the number of domains and their hosts. Domain is a name that has name server (NS) records associated with it. In other words, there may be subdomains or hosts under it (i.e., "edu " is the top- level domain at many universities, such as "mit.edu " and "tamu.edu"). A top-level domain name is either an ISO country code or one of the generic domains such as "com, " "org, " "net, " "edu, " and so on. Each domain may consist of many hosts. A host is a domain nam