How the Internet Happened: From Netscape to the iPhone

by Brian McCullough

THE INTERNET, AND ESPECIALLY the World Wide Web, finally brought computers into the mainstream. The Internet is the reason that computers actually became useful for the average person.

It all came down to this: no one in tech, no one in media, no one from Bill Gates to Jerry Levin to Hollywood ubermogul Barry Diller had realized what Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark had realized: the information superhighway was already here. The Internet and the World Wide Web were the information superhighway. The revolution was now, and it was being delivered not by the television, but by the computer.

The web could deliver on all of the promises of the information superhighway, and it delivered on those promises in the democratic, utopian way that so enthused early adopters of the web like Marc Andreessen. The information superhighway was interactive, sure. It let you talk back to your TV. But it didn’t allow you to create your own television program. The web, by contrast, allowed users to consume content, and create it. Any user. Anywhere. Any kind of content. And anyone could do so outside the control of a major media corporation or gatekeepers like the cable companies or Microsoft.

necessity dictated that search engines would become the most popular and most important early websites. And because the problem of a business model had been solved by HotWired, search sites, and Yahoo in particular, would become the web’s first great companies.

Pets.com was losing money on every dog leash it shipped. But if you looked at the company’s bottom line at the time of the IPO, the biggest expenses, at $42.5 million—a whopping 76% of total operating costs—were for marketing and sales. Advertising. And that’s why we remember Pets.com, if, indeed, we remember it at all. Priceline might have had William Shatner, but Pets.com had the sock puppet.

The general public has intuited that the Internet and digital technology enable a world of unlimited selection and instant gratification. If your business model stands in the way of that, well, consumers will just go around you. It’s a lesson that the music industry failed to learn from Napster, and it’s a lesson that media companies are having to re-confront again and again, even down to the present day. ■

placement. Ever enamored with math and the power of algorithms, Google introduced an important new ranking factor for the ads that it called a “Quality Score.” In essence, Google’s system took into account how often that ad was actually clicked on, in addition to how much an advertiser was willing to pay per click.