The Economist magazine`s annual innovation awards for this year remind one of the roots of the Internet and why radio spectrum licences have proved to be a major source of income for countries.
Tim Berners-Lee and Paul Baran both proposed ideas that ultimately gave birth to the Internet, although their concepts were separated by some 30 years. Ronald Coarse, a professor of economics, was the first to ask why valuable radio spectrum was going to waste.
According to the Economist, Baran, co-founder of the Institute for the Future, started to think about how to make the US` communications infrastructure resistant to nuclear attack in 1959.
His proposal was called "distributed adaptive messaging block switching" that is known today as packet switching. The idea was first ignored and then given its first try out in a system called ARPANET in 1969.
In 1989 Berners-Lee, then a director of the World Wide Web Consortium, proposed a scheme to enable electronic documents to link to other documents stored on other computers. He went on to write the first web browser and server, both of which he gave away for free, along with the details to describe and transmit web pages.
Coarse also had his idea scorned at first. He suggested private property rights over radio spectrum and the formation of a market to allocate spectrum efficiently. This concept, many have argued, is the reason for the success of cellular networks in Africa, which now outstrip fixed line installations on the continent by a factor of five to one.
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