Internet - Computing: A Business History - page 59

cessful Internet communication between a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) client and
a server. "Without Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau we wouldn't have the World Wide
Web," says Cerf, "without which there'd be no avalanche of information flowing into the
Net. Information flow is what the Internet is about. Information sharing is power. If don't
share your ideas, smart people can't do anything about them, and you'll remain anonymous
and powerless."
HTTP - via the language HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) - enabled easy nav-
igation of the Net through point and click movement across hyperlinks - thus enabling one
to seem to "surf" the information on the Web from one related document to another. The
first significantly distributed and used client (aka, browser ) for the Web was Mosaic , de-
veloped at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University
of Illinois Urbana-Champaign beginning in late 1992 and released non-commercially in
1993. Mosaic stands as grandfather to all of today's popular browsers, including Netscape
Navigator , Mozilla's FireFox , Microsoft Internet Explorer , Google's Chrome , and Apple's
Safari . Note: Netscape Navigator dominated browser market share in the 1990s, but by
2002 claimed few users. Navigator lost considerable market-share to Microsoft's Internet
Explorer because Netscape Communications Corporation (eventually acquired by AOL)
did not invest in the development necessary to keep Navigator competitive. The business
demise of Netscape served as a central fact used by the U.S. Justice Department in Mi-
crosoft's famous 1998 antitrust trial, wherein the Court ruled that Microsoft Corporation's
bundling of Explorer with the Windows operating system consituted a monopolistic [and
therefore illegal] business practice.)
At first, the idea of the Internet and the Web was highly idealistic: scientists and engin-
eers and mathematicians at work on significant work, communicating in nearly real-time
across the country and across the globe, and also publishing original research on a far more
timely basis than was ever before possible. Others - in the spirit of the original small com-
puter innovators and hackers - saw the Internet as a tool for breaking free from govern-
mental control.
One of these was John Perry Barlow - former Wyoming cattle rancher, noted Grateful
Dead lyricist, and earnest philosopher of all things digital. (Full disclosure: Barlow sits on
the editorial board of New Street Communications, LLC, the publisher of this topic.) In
1990, Barlow was the first to apply William Gibson's science fiction term "Cyberspace" to
the global electronic social space now generally referred to by that name. Until his naming
it, it had not been considered any sort of place.
In a seminal February 8, 1996 document entitled "A Declaration of the Independence
of Cyberspace," Barlow posited the Internet as a new electronic frontier - a tribal no-man's
land - a beautiful, flowering anarchy quite free from the strictures of government regula-
tion.