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Abstract
This article portrays the first decade of Internet connectivity in Israel. It focuses on the technology of the Internet, i.e. on the cables and wires that carry the Internet around the world, and on the bureaucratic processes that are called into play as the Internet reaches a new country. While the Internet appears to be a supranational technology, its institutionalization in Israel – and indeed throughout the world – can be seen to have been heavily dependent on state-level machinations, thereby inviting a somewhat more Westphalian approach than might be considered appropriate when dealing with such a global phenomenon as the Internet.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the Shaine Center for Research in the Social Sciences, the Eshkol Institute, the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Israel Internet Association for their generous financial support for this project. I am grateful to Eva Illouz, Michael Shalev, Michal Frenkel, and Shuki Mairovich for their helpful and insightful comments. I am also grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their useful comments.
Notes
1. See, for instance, http://www.mundi.net/maps/maps_011/index.html#landweber_map2. For a critical deconstruction of Landweber's and other maps of the Internet, see Martin Dodge and Rob Kitchin, “Exposing the ‘Second Text’ of Maps of the Net,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 5, no. 4 (2000): http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol5/issue4/dodge_kitchin.htm.
2. Canonical texts include Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas Parke Hughes, and Trevor Pinch, eds., The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987); Wiebe E. Bijker and John Law, eds., Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992); Donald A. MacKenzie and Judy Wajcman, eds., The Social Shaping of Technology (Buckingham, England and Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1999).
3. Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 34. See also Susan Leigh Star and Geoffrey C. Bowker, “How to Infrastructure,” in Handbook of New Media: Social Shaping and Consequences of ICTs (Updated Student Edition), ed. Leah A. Lievrouw and Sonia M. Livingstone (London and Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2006), 230–45.
4. Saskia Sassen, “Introduction: Deciphering the Global,” in Deciphering the Global: Its Scales, Spaces and Subjects, ed. Saskia Sassen (New York: Routledge, 2007), 1.
6. Some of those can be accessed from http://mosaic.unomaha.edu/Pages/GDI_Publications.html.
7. Phillip Ein-Dor, Seymour Goodman, and Peter Wolcott, The Global Diffusion of the Internet Project: The State of Israel (The Global Diffusion of the Internet Project, 1999).
8. Detailed in Phillip Ein-Dor, Seymour Goodman, and Peter Wolcott, The Global Diffusion of the Internet Project: The State of Israel (The Global Diffusion of the Internet Project, 1999)
9. Unix-to-Unix Copy Protocol. A protocol for copying files between different Unix machines via modem and network connections. See http://www.uucp.org/info.shtml.
10. As related to me by email by Daniel Braniss, nowadays Manager of Computing Facilities, the Selim and Rachel Benin School of Engineering and Computer Science, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
11. The CS in CSNET stands for Computer Science.
12. This and other interviews cited below were conducted face-to-face at the interviewees' place of work during 2004–2005.
13. “The international BITNET network began in the spring of 1981 when Ira H. Fuchs and Greydon Freeman, of the City University of New York and Yale University, respectively, decided that IBM's Network Job Entry (NJE) communications protocol made computer-based communication practical between their universities,” http://www.cren.net/cren/cren-hist-fut.html.
14. See Borka Jerman-Blazic, “Computer Networking for the European Academic Community: The Eureka Project Cosine,” Computers and Chemistry 14, no. 4 (1990): 300; David Dickson, “Europeans Look IBM Gift Horse in the Mouth,” Science 226 (1984): 27–8.
15. Of all Israeli politicians, in the last couple of decades Michael Eitan is most identified with promoting the Internet in Israel.
16. Ein-Dor, Goodman, and Wolcott, The Global Diffusion of the Internet.
17. Efforts to locate a representative of Bezeq for interview were unsuccessful.
18. Email correspondence with Joe van Zwaren, formerly Chief Scientist at the Ministry of Science and a key figure in the diffusion of the Internet to and within Israel.
19. Federal Research Internet Coordinating Committee, Program Plan for the National Research and Education Network, May 23, 1989, pp. 4-5, cited in Request For Comments 1192 (http://www.rfc-archive.org/getrfc.php?rfc = 1192).
20. The NSFNET Backbone Services Acceptable Use Policy, June 1992, http://www.merit.edu/mail.archives/mjts/1993-01/msg00000.html.
21. For Berners-Lee's own account, see Tim Berners-Lee and Mark Fischetti, Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web by Its Inventor (San Francisco: Harper, 1999).
22. ARPANET (the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) was the first packet switching network in the world and the prototype for today's Internet.
23. Avi Rahav, Report of the Committee for Examining the Promotion of Internet Services in Israel (Tel Aviv: Ministry of Communications, 1999).
24. There are a number of small discrepancies between Nussbacher's timeline (http://www.interall.co.il/israel-internet-timeline.html), the Rahav Report, and interviewees' memories. However, these discrepancies do not impact on the overall picture.
25. The first ISPs in Israel were Actcom, Dataserve, Kav Mancheh, and Bezeq Zahav. Of these companies, one remained active in the ISP industry until being bought out by a much larger company in 2009 (Actcom); one has disappeared entirely (Dataserve); and the other two never became fully fledged commercial providers for home usage (Bezeq Zahav and Kav Mancheh, which provided mainly business services, such as livestock exchange data). See http://shekel.jct.ac.il/faq/net/israel-answer.html.
26. Nussbacher recalls that 80% of applications were granted; Shikmoni's recollection is that virtually all applications were approved. They both sat on the committee that discussed applications. On the other hand, the owner of an early ISP told me of a poet whose request to be granted permission to access the Internet was denied on the grounds that his application was not research based.
27. Darcom received a licence, but never provided Internet services. The company had been set up by David Reichmann, a Canadian immigrant, mainly to provide a communications link between Israel and North America. However, Reichmann died in August 1994.
28. Beryl Bellman, Alex Tindimubona, and Armando Arias, Jr., “Technology Transfer in Global Networking: Capacity Building in Africa and Latin America,” in Global Networks: Computers and International Communication, ed. L.M. Harasim (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 237–54.
29. Will Foster, Seymour Goodman, Eric Osiakwan, and Adam Bernstein, “Global Diffusion of the Internet IV: The Internet in Ghana,” Communications of the Association for Information Systems 13 (2004): 1–46.
30. Will Foster, Seymour Goodman, Eric Osiakwan, and Adam Bernstein, “Global Diffusion of the Internet IV: The Internet in Ghana,” Communications of the Association for Information Systems 13 (2004), 6.
31. Will Foster, Seymour Goodman, Eric Osiakwan, and Adam Bernstein, “Global Diffusion of the Internet IV: The Internet in Ghana,” Communications of the Association for Information Systems 13 (2004), 8.
32. Torsten Haegerstrand, Innovation Diffusion as a Spatial Process (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967 [1953]), 8.
33. Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990); Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991).
34. Foster et al., “Global Diffusion of the Internet.”
35. Everett M. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations (New York: Free Press, 1962), 102.
36. See Edna Lomsky-Feder and Tamar Rapoport, “Homecoming, Immigration, and the National Ethos: Russian-Jewish Homecomers Reading Zionism,” Anthropological Quarterly 74, no. 1 (2001): 1–14.
37. See http://web.macam98.ac.il/ ∼ dovw/.
38. This movement to Israel by hi-tech people is not restricted to the Internet alone. Indeed, Intel's hugely successful Israeli branch was set up by an Israeli Jew returning from America, as were IBM's Israeli offices. This was explained to me in interview by Dr. Abe Peled.
39. Held on 14 July 2010.
40. See Saskia Sassen, “Globalization or Denationalization?,” Review of International Political Economy 10, no. 1 (2003): 8; See also Saskia Sassen, “Spatialities and Temporalities of the Global: Elements for a Theorization,” Public Culture 12, no. 1 (2000): 215–32; Saskia Sassen, “‘Towards a Sociology of Information Technology’,” Current Sociology 50, no. 3 (2002): 365–88.
41. Sassen, “Introduction: Deciphering the Global,” 1.