The Flexible Specialization Path of the Internet

1998

________________________________________________________________________ The Internet provides a new paradigm for the evolution of communication industries, one that facilitates the emergence of new types of flexible organization structures. This is due in part to the philosophy and technology behind the Internet Protocol (IP), and also to the current stage of industrial development and convergence of communications media. We argue that the forces that have heretofore compelled vertical integration of telephone and cable television apply with weaker force to the Internet. Moreover, the inherent design features of IP allow it to serve as a separating spanning layer that decouples the innovation and provisioning processes for applications and the underlying facilities infrastructure. This reduces the asset-specificity inherent in earlier infrastructure and service architectures and enables industry participants to more flexibly organize and reorganize firm-specific assets, resulting in a proliferation of viable business strategies. The fulfillment of this process is likely to be an industry of both integrated and nonintegrated firm types, coexisting and using new types of emergent wholesale markets (e.g., IP transport services) to share assets across infrastructure and service provider platforms. This paper makes the case for why the Internet paradigm is substantively different from earlier communications technologies by analyzing trends in the technology and industry structure, and the economic forces driving those trends. The research presented here reflects the further elaboration and synthesis of work presented

JETS PAPER-UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH …, 2000

This papers provides a framework for organizing empirical research on structural change in electronic commerce at the nexus between infrastructure and virtual activity. The framework identifies several key questions for understanding the evolution of the value chain underlying electronic commerce. The paper illustrates this framework on one example, the development of the commercial Internet access market. It also organizes its discussion of future research using the same themes, encompassing many classes of open issues. Policy for electronic commerce requires analysis for an evolving dynamic market, where the frameworks are rooted in an understanding of the economics of diffusion, adaptation and industry evolution.

Telecommunications Policy, 1994

This paper illustrates the need for a continuing and more focused role for regulation in the face of competitive entry in communications infrastructure supply. It reviews the trends in the marketplace and points to the critical sites where long-term industry outcomes are being negotiated, including the terms and conditions of network interconnection, the degree to which network operators are obliged to unbundle network functionality, and the political and economic choices as to who bears the costs of the underlying information and communications infrastructure.

Prometheus, 2015

in E Miller and W J Samuels (eds) An Institutionalist Approach to Public Utilities Regulation, 2002

Handbook of New Media: Social Shaping and Consequences of ICTs

2016

Shane Greenstein is a chaired professor at Harvard Business School and the cochair of its Digital Initiative. His goal in the ambitious new volume How the Internet Became Commercial: Innovation, Privatization, and the Birth of a New Network is to “explain how and why the Internet deployed” (p. 4) and was transformed from its origins within DARPA and then the NSF into a private commercial network that continues to touch and transform billions of lives. Greenstein supplies the best single account of the commercial development of the Internet up until 2003. To tackle the process of “innovation from the edges,” Greenstein “identifies the economic archetypes, government policies, and influential institutions that shaped the growth and evolution of the commercial Internet” (p. 10). He raises—and goes a long way toward answering—a fundamental question: “How and why did the operations of economic archetypes, the adoption of government policies, and the influence of institutions encourage or...

2019

Many of us have held a vision of the Internet as the ultimate distributed platform that allows communication, the provision of services, and competition from any corner of the world. But as the Internet has matured, it seems to also feed the creation of large, centralised entities in many areas. This phenomenon could be looked at from many different angles, but this memo considers the topic from the perspective of how available technology and Internet architecture drives different market directions.

International Journal of Technology Management, 2006

Many advantages have been ascribed to the Internet. Although it lacks the necessary elements to be regarded as a strategic resource, the Internet seems to be a useful tool to provide support for business strategies. In this work we discuss how the Internet can be used to support the development of capabilities and define firm boundaries. Using a sample of Spanish firms, empirically analysed, we find positive relationships between the use of the Internet and product differentiation, as well as the introduction of organizational changes. In addition, we present evidence that the Internet reduces both internal coordination costs and transaction costs as a result of the positive relationships found between the use of the Internet, the degree of vertical integration and the establishment of technological agreements with suppliers and customers.