By the end of the 1980s the technology of the ARPANET was dated and the NSF’s Network, NSFNET, was much more capable of keeping up with the growth of networking. By February 1990 the ARPANET had transferred all host connections to the NSFNET and was officially out of commission.1 It still wasn’t until the 90s that the Internet extended beyond the academic world and started to be seen as a public communications medium. Since the NSFNET was under government control, commercial activity across the network was prohibited and all users were required to abide by the “Acceptable Use Policy” that sought to ensure that the network would only be used for research and educational purposes. Due to the size of the network this policy was not only difficult to enforce but was seen as limiting to the growing user base as it expanded beyond academic communities. (Abbate 196) After the introduction of the World Wide Web in 1991, navigating the Internet became a lot easier. Telecommunications companies began to see how lucrative the market of providing networking services could be and by 1995 the government had completely relinquished control of the Internet and the commercial version was now the only version.
The popularity of the Internet increased significantly as it shifted into the private sector and the user-driven development that was a fundamental characteristic of the Internet looked completely different than it had in the early days of the ARPANET. The flood of new users created a public discourse around the internet and how it would institute new social functions. Introducing corporate competition into network access meant that the network was now “... used by people and institutions operating as consumers within the bounds of an “information-as-commodity philosophy””2 (Murphy, 28) and this philosophy created access barriers that people like Swartz worked to resist.