J eff K osseff . The Twenty-Six Words That Created the Internet

We have many histories of the origins of the hardware ̧ protocols, and software of the world-wide, computer-based communications network, the Internet, but there have been few explorations of its commercialization. In The Twenty-Six Words That Created the Internet, Jeff Kosseff, informed by his legal background, provides an important history of one component of the rise of the Internet as a business. He focuses on the unique legal protections the United States government provided early on to the sector that evolved into what became known as social media, one dominated by United States companies such as Twitter, Yelp, and Facebook. Related protections also benefited search engines such as Google. Through his biography of Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act and related critical legal decisions Kosseff shows us how a little-noticed bipartisan law intended to foster free speech and a new industry helped lead to nerds’ tiny start-ups becoming...

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