Lessons Learnt from the Internet: Hands Off, Hands On, or What Role of Public Policy in Europe

The evolution of the Internet challenges traditional approaches of industrial and technology policy and seems to suggest a hands off policy. The cultural impact of the network, on the other hand, appears to call for some regulatory intervention into its future development. The article’s first part briefly examines the role of U.S. public policy in the early stages of the Internet and then provides a critical assessment of institutional and policy factors in the EU which slowed down the Internet’s diffusion on this side of the Atlantic. Only recently can we observe changes. Telecommunications liberalization and the emergence of market competition in this industry coincide with a new Internet policy that recognizes the infra-structural significance of this network for a European information society and the need to involve Internet users in order to exploit the potential of this network. Another look at the Internet’s history in the article’s second part unveils that the network evolved in a cultural context that was shaped by the communities of designers and users whose members were either scientists and engineers or belonged to the “computer hacker” community. The technical design of the initial Internet embedded, reflected and reinforced elements of this cultural mixture. The technical ease with which the Internet extended into many diverse cultural settings has provided incentives and exerted pressures towards cultural change, and it has triggered efforts to control the use of and the content which is communicated via the net. The resulting dynamics unfolded as a consequence of the interdependence of technical and cultural elements. The cultural effects are manifold: rather than a uniform mega-trend we observe cultural globalization, cultural pluralization and fragmentation and also cultural convergence. Thus restrictive political intervention to protect a specific national culture would be the wrong recipe