A Primer on Internet Economics: Economic Aspects of Digital Information Technologies

One of the major economic developments in the world of the last decade has been the complementary globalization of production and the rapid development of information and communication technology as exhibited through the emergence of the Internet. The preliminary analysis presented here is guided by the belief that although the Internet has received a great deal of publicity, there still remain areas of vacuum with regard to research on the economics of the Internet and a more wide-spread understanding of the prime issues involved. After a brief history of the evolution of the Internet industry in section 2, a segmentation map of the Internet industry is presented in order to aid one in understanding potential Internet issues that will affect academics, political regulators, industry leaders, and the general public in the future. Equipped with this greater understanding of the way the Internet functions, economic issues and Internet concepts are selectively identified and discussed within the basic structure of interoperability, network externalities and the equitable statistical sharing of Internet resources.