Managing Business Models in the Net Economy: the case of Spotify

13 1.1 Brief History of the Internet The Internet in its embryonic form (ARPANET) was born in the 1960s as a project of the Ministry of Defense of the United States. During the Cold War any centralized “control center” would be a prime target in a nuclear attack. This problem gave birth to the idea of a decentralized network with redundant connections. In the late 1960s a few computers were already connected. In the 1970s the network created by the Ministry of Defense then grew with all the universities in the United States and some other defense-oriented companies and institutes of research. The ARPANET led then to the development of protocols 1 for internetworking, but the first real applications were built about ten years later: in 1982 the term “Internet” - chosen because the instrument was designed to connect disparate networks across the country and even the world - was used for the first time, and the TCP/IP protocol was defined and standardized. The TCP/IP protocol was designed to break large amounts of information into small packets, which were to be identified with a source and a destination. The source was called “sender’s IP address” and the destination the “receiver’s IP address”. Commercial Internet Service Providers (ISPs) began to emerge in the late 1980s and early 1990s. At this phase, the Internet could already be defined as a vast collection of networks of computers that were interconnected both physically and through their ability to encode and decode certain specialized communication protocols. In 1990, there were 100,000 computers connected. The following year, the CERN 2 developed the HTML language and the source code for the first World Wide Web browser. In two years, the number of computers rose from 100,000 to one million. In 1999, the number of computers connected to the Internet was 200 million. According to current estimates, at the end of the year 2013, the number of people who had access to the Internet exceeded 2.4 billion, increased by 566.4% in the last ten years. 1 A protocol in this sense is simply a specification of how computers exchange information 2 European Organization for Nuclear Research