Net Loss: Internet Prophets, Private Profits, and the Costs to Community

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“While the dot.com’s have crashed and burned, the ideology surrounding them hasn’t. Nathan Newman’s Net Loss is an essential and original contribution to putting the cyberlibertarians’ nonsense behind us—a reminder of the central role of government in developing the Internet, and the legal manipulations behind all the wacky and destructive experiments in deregulation of the last twenty years. An important story very well told.” —DOUG HENWOOD, editor of Left Business Observer, and author of the forthcoming A New Economy? “Nathan Newman tells us that the received wisdom on the Internet is simply wrong. The Internet is supposed to annihilate the state, undermining both the practical importance and the empirical need for government; Newman tells us the truth is exactly the opposite. The Internet is supposed to annihilate geography; Newman tells us that, at every stage, it shows us both the importance and the need for community -level economic regulation. You may not agree with Newman’s conclusions, but you will not be able to ignore them.” —JAMES BOYLE, Duke Law School “Net Loss is the perfect antidote for the confusion generated by the years of hype and the recent disillusionment surrounding the Internet economy. Nathan Newman offers a cogent and original analysis of what the Internet has really meant to the regional economy of the Silicon Valley as well as to other regions. Anyone in search of fresh ideas carefully grounded in a rich base of research will find this book just what they have been looking for.” —PETER EVANS, University of California, Berkeley P O L I T I C A L S C I E N C E / T E C H N O L O G Y H I S T O R Y / S O C I O L O G Y How has the Internet been changing our lives, and how did these changes come about? Nathan Newman seeks the answers to these questions by studying the emergence of the Internet economy in Silicon Valley and the ensuing transformation of power relations. Net Loss explains why technological innovation and growth have been accompanied by increasing economic inequality and a sense of political powerlessness among many. More optimistically, Newman sees an emerging countertrend of global use of the Internet by grassroots organizations, such as those in the antiglobalization movements, that may help to transcend this local powerlessness. N AT H A N N E W M A N is currently a union lawyer in New York City and has been a frequent writer on technology issues in such publications as MIT’s Technology Review, The Progressive Populist, and The American Prospect. A political activist and former union organizer, he was also the project director at NetAction, a consumer technology advocacy group. T H E P E N N S Y L VA N I A S TAT E U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S University Park, Pennsylvania | www.psupress.org ,!7IA2H1-accaff!:t;K;k;K;k ISBN 0-271-02205-1 ...