I'm working on a technical book about a new way in which corporations are using the Web to achieve the holy grail, "enterprise application integration", using a new family of technologies called "Web Services". The book is targeted at working programmers, so it will mostly be that sort of technical content.
But there is an idea floating around geekdom that the Web works (in the sense that it scales 5B+ documents, something which no one really expected) because of various purely technological ideas (most of which get attributed, inaccurately, to Tim Berners-Lee). I want to engage this idea in my book (for my own nefarious, leftie political reasons) and my publisher is cool with me doing a bit of "politics of technology".
My suggestion will be that of at least *equal importance* to these technical fixes (having mostly to do with the differences between version 1.0 and 1.1 of the HTTP protocol, for anyone who cares) is the massive influx of investment dollars to beef up the infrastructure of the Internet, most of which the Web benefited from. In other words, we can't say for sure that the purely technical fixes "saved the Web" because they happened in conjunction with massive investments in router, packet switching, last-mile, server, and bandwidth technologies and capacities. Thus, it's entirely possible that $$ saved the Web, rather than purely technical changes.
So, getting to the point, I'm wondering whether folks hereabouts can point me to solid research about the magnitude of this investment? I'd like to back up my argument with some solid economic research into the question, and I'm not really adept at ferreting that sort of thing out from a library, being a humanities type.
Any pointers would be greatly appreciated and will merit a slot in my acknowledgments section. :>
Thanks, Kendall Clark -- Nobody said it was easy No one ever said it would be this hard Oh take me back to the start
--Coldplay, The Scientist