How the Internet Became Commercial

Shane  Greenstein

Book | 2015

How the Internet Became Commercial: Innovation, Privatization, and the Birth of a New Network

Abstract

In less than a decade, the Internet went from being a series of loosely connected networks used by universities and the military to the powerful commercial engine it is today. This book describes how many of the key innovations that made this possible came from entrepreneurs and iconoclasts who were outside the mainstream—and how the commercialization of the Internet was by no means a foregone conclusion at its outset. Shane Greenstein traces the evolution of the Internet from government ownership to privatization to the commercial Internet we know today. This is a story of innovation from the edges. Greenstein shows how mainstream service providers that had traditionally been leaders in the old-market economy became threatened by innovations from industry outsiders who saw economic opportunities where others didn't—and how these mainstream firms had no choice but to innovate themselves. New models were tried: some succeeded, some failed. Commercial markets turned innovations into valuable products and services as the Internet evolved in those markets. New business processes had to be created from scratch as a network originally intended for research and military defense had to deal with network interconnectivity, the needs of commercial users, and a host of challenges with implementing innovative new services.

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Greenstein, Shane. How the Internet Became Commercial: Innovation, Privatization, and the Birth of a New Network. Princeton University Press, 2015.

Article | MIS Quarterly | September 2018

Do Experts or Crowd-Based Models Produce More Bias? Evidence from Encyclopædia Britannica and Wikipedia

Shane Greenstein and Feng Zhu

Organizations today can use both crowds and experts to produce knowledge. While prior work compares the accuracy of crowd-produced and expert-produced knowledge, we compare bias in these two models in the context of contested knowledge, which involves subjective, unverifiable, or controversial information. Using data from Encyclopædia Britannica, authored by experts, and Wikipedia, an encyclopedia produced by an online community, we compare the slant and bias of pairs of articles on identical topics of U.S. politics. Our slant measure is less (more) than zero when an article leans towards Democratic (Republican) viewpoints, while bias is the absolute value of the slant. We find that Wikipedia articles are more slanted towards Democratic views than are Britannica articles, as well as more biased. The difference in bias between a pair of articles decreases with more revisions. The bias on a per word basis hardly differs between the sources because Wikipedia articles tend to be longer than Britannica articles. These results highlight the pros and cons of each knowledge production model, help identify the scope of the empirical generalization of prior studies comparing the information quality of the two production models, and offer implications for organizations managing crowd-based knowledge production.

Keywords: online community; Collective Intelligence; wisdom of crowds; bias; Wikipedia; Britannica; knowledge production; Knowledge Sharing; Knowledge Dissemination; Prejudice and Bias;

Citation:

Greenstein, Shane, and Feng Zhu. "Do Experts or Crowd-Based Models Produce More Bias? Evidence from Encyclopædia Britannica and Wikipedia." MIS Quarterly 42, no. 3 (September 2018): 945–959. View Details

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In May 2016, Michael Rechtin, an expert in international data center law, advised global financial services firm Great Lakes Banking Group (GLBG) on its plans to upgrade its data centers. The bank’s data processing and storage systems were in need of an update, and since GLBG last made heavy IT investments in the late 1990s, the technology had changed considerably. GLBG sought Rechtin’s advice on whether or not it should build a new data center, pursue a wholesale colocation solution, rent space from a retail colocation provider, or store more data in the cloud.

The B note brings the reader up through early 2017 and addresses an informal review carried out by the Wireless Telecommunications Bureau (WTB) on sponsored data and zero-rating data plans in the mobile broadband market.

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How the Internet Became Commercial: Innovation, Privatization, and the Birth of a New Network

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