“The idea,” which Shaw says occurred to him and Bezos, “was always that someone would be allowed to make a profit as an intermediary. The key question is, ‘Who will get to be that middleman?’”
In another Twitter essay, Andreessen argued that technological progress has benefited the poor much more than the rich—an observation he insists “flows from basic economics.” Therefore, he writes, “Opposing tech innovation is punishing the poor by slowing the process by which they get things previo…
In fact, McCarthy and the other early hackers were critical of those who saw the computer revolution as a path to personal wealth or its close cousin, personal power. Even Lou Montulli recalls being taken aback by the promise of a quick fortune from Jim Clark. “He filled our heads with giant number…
More broadly, Barlow was arguing that nothing from the offline world—traditional rules, institutions, and codes of behavior, even history itself—carried any weight in cyberspace, which was “a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, o…
By the early 1990s, the last official barriers to business and commerce on the Internet were torn down through a combination of congressional legislation and new rules from the National Science Foundation, the organization that supported the Internet. The noncommercial status of the Internet was ro…
