It's at this point we can see how a concern for the control of communication in this medium has become so important at the governmental level. .
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In the 1980's the development of groups or "networks"" are being established over North America and Europe to keep pace with the growing ability to use computers as a communication medium. This leads to the establishment of organized task forces and the organization of structured entities that began to standardize the inner workings of the internet. It is here where the competitive and global aspects of the internet began to take shape as Tim Berners-Lee, a researcher at CERN, the particle physics laboratory in Geneva, wrote a memo to his supervisors suggesting his ideas for the invention of a worldwide network that would revolutionize everything. (Berners-Lee, Frischetti, 1999) .
In the early nineties Bereners-Lee takes the idea of a "world wide web " and shares his html code with the rest of the world. As this happens the internet makes its transition from the worlds of science and the military and through advancements into service providers and main stream users through companies such as Netscape and even the White house took notice and launched its own web site. The marketing world also took notice and the internet business boom went into full swing. By 1996, there were approximately 45 million people using the internet. 1999 this increased to 150 million with more than half of them from the United States. By the year 2000, there were 407 million users in the world. This grew to between 600 and 800 million users by 2002. (Castels, 2001) The rest as they say is history. .
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So far as the internet history has been presented, it may seem as a lengthy journey but in a historical perspective it is rather short and compressed. What is for certain is that the internet has developed at a pace that most scientists, government officials and business executives see as unparalleled when compared to other aspects of social, cultural or national mechanisms.
