Six Years That Shook the World: the Story of the Internet, Telecom and Optical Market Revolutions

Six Years that Shook the World provides a short, but deep history of the internet, telecom and optical market revolutions that has initiated an evolution from a global push economic structure to an emerging pull economic model. The internet and telecom boom of the 1990s and its crash post-2000 were the product of a cycle of regulation and deregulation that will in time result in the change of the regulatory controls on the communication industry of America. The internet is the lowest-cost and most powerful economic transaction medium available to corporations with which an economic transaction can be completed. It provides global reach assuming network and computing infrastructure is present. The value of the internet as a transaction medium becomes apparent when it is put into the context of the chain of commerce. The internet provides the end-user, whether consumer or businesses, with constant availability of information and the continuous ability to execute transactions. Transactions can be any computing event that triggers an exchange of value for support of the transaction. Lowering the cost of transactions and improving productivity by leveraging the internet will drive economic development. Telecom deregulation in 1934 and 1996 released inherent monopolized market value, which was the determining factor for significant capital investments and produced the genesis proofs of a pull economy - but provided an insufficient amount of infrastructure to achieve the revolutionary vision of a new economy and failed to ensure American leadership in a global economy. Investment in the communication infrastructure is mandatory to ensure the United States is the leader in the emerging pull economic structure. Six Years that Shook the World describes the cycle of innovation and deregulation in the context of the telecom and networking industries. It argues that the communications industry that was invented in America is now being led by multi-national companies who are located in other nation-states. America is on the verge of forever relinquishing our leadership in networking and telecommunications, because we are failing to ensure the establishment of a real and complete technology infrastructure for a new economy in the United States.