Self-Colonizing eEurope: The Information Society Merges onto the Information Superhighway

Abstract

This comparative article investigates the different views of the internet—what it could do and what it was for—as they emerged in news media, popular culture, and policy in the United State and Europe before the year 2000. In the United States, the internet was imagined as an inevitability, as the domain of private corporations, and as a new frontier that would usher the United States into an era of global economic dominance. In Europe, the internet was imagined as a technological choice, as a technology subordinate to national institutions, and as a public utility that the state should provide citizens through national telecommunications corporations. Despite these differences, this article shows how, as the century concluded, the political imaginings of the internet in the two locations converged. While EU policymakers increasingly envisioned the internet as a free market and a means for global economic power, U.S. policymakers envisaged it more and more as a requirement for competent democratic citizenship. Europe "Americanized" its internet policies by increasing competition through cuts in state support for national telecommunications corporations, and the United States "Europeanized" theirs by promoting policies designed to bridge the "digital divide." Ultimately, this article shows how the internet served both as an agent of change and a discursive construction through which varying imaginings were contested. In particular, Europe's adoption of the eEurope 2005 project—an endorsement of American-style unsubsidized corporations instead of European-style statist traditions—suggests that the internet functioned as a transatlantic cultural carrier of advanced capitalism.

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