and 1970s by touting individual autonomy and emphasizing employee initiative as a path to self‐fulfillment, whilst marginalizing its social critique, embodied in trade unions and more concerned with wage inequality. In short, employment was not simply something necessary for earning a living, but it was also a way to achieve creative freedom through self‐expression. The espousal of these new forms of freedom and autonomy for workers proved to be an effective way of reducing the fixed costs of corporations. As more workers embraced flexible work routines, they carried the burden of funding their own benefits like insurance, retirement plans, etc. Indeed, this trend can also be viewed today in a number of industries where freelance work has become prevalent, but the trend is particularly pronounced in the media and journalism industries as well as so‐called “creative” industries that employ artists, fashion designers, and stylists (see Deuze, 2007; McRobbie, 2016; Cohen, 2016).
4 The Transformation of the Internet and Web‐Based Business Models
The structural changes of capitalism throughout the 20th century laid the foundation for the emergence of the Internet as a vehicle for intensifying capital accumulation. Furthermore, this process really began to ramp up toward the end of the 20th century when Internet service provision was privatized. In the wake of its privatization, Internet‐ and web‐based businesses went through a relatively rapid boom‐and‐bust cycle. While these years were somewhat tumultuous for speculative financial capital, the general tendency to network the world continues, as more and more people, places, and things become interconnected through digital technologies. In what follows, I focus on how the Internet transformed from a publicly funded research and development project to an unprecedented instrument for capital accumulation.
We can begin by looking at the development of the Internet and its various iterations before it was privatized in the 1990s. Early research and development into a distributed network architecture was funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in the United States. Established primarily to meet the needs of military demands, the development of DARPANET provided the initial architecture for what would eventually become the Internet in the United States. However, the network passed through various changes, including both ARPANET, MILNET (for military sites), and NSFNET, named after the National Science Foundation, which administered the network until 1995 (see Abbate, 1999). These iterations of the early Internet were funded directly by public money through the Department of Defense and were designed to serve two essential functions. On the one hand, military sites could be linked through MILNET, while ARPANET linked various civilian research communities so they could share information freely with one another. The latter function was achieved through NSFNET’s Acceptable Use Policy (AUP), which ensured that the network was used for non‐profit research and educational purposes while also prohibiting most commercial use. The policy remained in effect until the early 1990s, at which point commercial Internet service providers were allowed onto the network. In other words, one of the foundational principles of the early Internet was that information on the network ought to be freely available to others. This same principle is also identified as one of the tenets of the “hacker ethic” as defined by Levy (2010). The privatization of the Internet culminated in 1994 after a contentious hearing before the US Congress where the decision was made to relinquish public control of the network to commercial providers.
The privatization of Internet service provision dramatically increased Internet connectivity throughout the 1990s as more and more people migrated online. In response, businesses sought to take advantage of the growing market for Internet services and web‐based business models. Companies like America Online thrived in the market for Internet service provision, while the online marketplace eBay was founded in 1995. The introduction that year of the https protocol enabled secure financial dealings so that sellers like Amazon and services like eBay became the dominant business model of the “Web 1.0” era, which was aimed at providing content to consumers on web pages or selling web‐based products or services directly to consumers. Meanwhile, Microsoft dominated the market for Internet browsers by negotiating a partnership with IBM, whereby IBM’s personal computers would come pre‐packaged with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer installed on IBM’s hardware. Microsoft exemplified the power of companies during this era by developing and selling software either directly to consumers or to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) like IBM. Since IBM dominated the market for personal computers, as well as computers sold to other enterprises, Microsoft effectively prohibited any competitor from mounting a challenge to its monopolistic position, especially in the market for Internet browsers. Indeed, it was Microsoft’s agreement with IBM that eventually led to its conviction for antitrust violations in 2001 after the United States Department of Justice found the company guilty of anticompetitive market behaviors (see The United States v. Microsoft, 2001). The Microsoft antitrust conviction coincided with the bursting of the dot‐com bubble, which began roughly in early 2000 and lasted through the end of 2002. On the day that the Microsoft antitrust decision was announced, the NASDAQ stock exchange lost approximately 8% of its total value and Microsoft alone lost nearly $80 billion of its market value (Ulick, 2000). From its peak in March, 2000 to its trough in October, 2002, the NASDAQ lost nearly $5 trillion in value (Gaither & Chmielewski, 2006).
Emerging out of the dot‐com crash came a reinvention in the way web‐based business would be conducted. Companies began to abandon old business models aimed at selling products and services directly to consumers. Instead, the consumers, or data and information about consumers, became the primary products of the emergent “Web 2.0” economy – a term coined by Tim O’Reilly (2005) – which, among other things, was characterized by providing interactive services to users so user‐generated content could be monetized by the platforms upon which those users interacted. It was within this context that we saw the rise of Facebook, Google, Wikipedia, and even the transformation of Amazon from simply a book‐selling company in the 1990s to one that began offering Amazon Web Services in 2002. This transformation in business models had dramatic consequences for social life, which is increasingly mediated by digital technologies. Ursula Huws (2014) summarizes this succinctly:
When human sociality is mediated by telecommunications systems, it leaves digital traces wherever it goes, traces that can be mined to generate data that enable advertising to be targeted with ever‐greater accuracy. The Internet is thus constituted as a vast virtual shopping mall, with its users bombarded with a constant stream of advertising, preying on their most personal vulnerabilities.
(p. 15)
These concerns have been explored within scholarly debates about immaterial labor, free labor, and digital labor (Lazzarato, 1996; Terranova, 2004; Scholz, 2013). The primary concern in these debates has been the nature of work and labor within the information, knowledge, and communication industries with a focus on forms of unpaid labor occurring online (see Andrejevic, 2007, 2012; Fuchs 2012). Particular attention has been paid to users' online behaviors, which are tracked and can be transformed into an audience commodity in the same way that Dallas Smythe (1981) identified with broadcasting. However, whereas Smythe argued that broadcast programs constituted a “free lunch” by producing audiences for advertisers, the parallel to online activity lies in platforms or web sites seeking the attention (or interaction) of users while data is collected about those activities. As we continue to rely on digital devices for an increasing amount of our social lives, the time spent online during both work and non‐work time, our digital labor – socially necessary time spent online – offers a more sophisticated form of the audience commodity as browsing data is extracted and transformed into value by service providers and other third‐party elements (Fuchs, 2011; McGuigan & Manzerolle, 2013; Turow, 2013).
The tendency of Internet platforms to monitor, measure, collect, and ultimately monetize data about their users has become one of the dominant business models existing online today. The idea is seemingly sound: encourage users to socialize, interact, create, share, or otherwise rely upon your service for connecting with others, and platforms can extract data from those interactions that can be monetized through sales to advertisers or other data companies. In effect, users are generating value gratis for these platforms, and there is evidence to suggest
