For the internet to work, there must be cell towers everywhere, many servers built, and tunnels built with cables connecteted to every home.
How was the government/corporations convinced to start construction? How was the public convinced to start paying extra to get access to 10 websites and hope that it would take off?
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In the beginning the internet was just a bunch of universities and research institutions and a very small number of private companies networking their computers together.
People who studied the right subjects at university got used to using email and USENET when they were students and many kept using it when they entered the private sector if their employer had the resources.
Eventually the first proto-ISPs appeared so those who could afford it could connect their home computer to the internet via their phone.
It was a small community for the longest time. Around the beginning of the 90s people posted messages to USENET about thing like “Linux” or a “WorldWideWeb” that they had come up with.
Year after year a new crop of students would be introduced to the Internet. It got bigger more userfriendly and instead of just a tiny group of students who were studying the right subjects every student got to use the university computer to go online.
Each year in September the number of new users grew and they were assimilated. Then in 1993 the Eternal September came and assimilation broke down.
Rules like don’t SPAM got broken and people started to commercialize what had previously been the work of just amateurs and hobbyist and non-profits.
The World Wide Web thing took off and other parts of the Internet fell by the way side.
Average people started buying Computers and went online with them.
The original paradigm of computer on the internet being equal was changed to a more centralized server and client model.
After even the longest time Microsoft who initially didn’t want to join in on that whole internet fad started offering something called Internet Explorer and Outlook for their home user Operating system.
By then the Internet was changed forever.
Infrastructure was built up, demand increased and people saw a way to profit from this new thing.
Existing telecommunication infrastructure was used and its use sold to customers and more was built as demand and opportunity for profit increased.
Quite a lot of it was driven by porn.
Cell towers were a thing that originally was built as its own thing. Carphones and cell phones and pagers and stuff like that. Only later did smart phones connected to the internet become a thing.
You had stuff like Blackberry phones and Palm Pilots and eventually the iPhone and Android.
Smartphones took advantage of infrastructure built for dumb phones the same way that computers with dial up connections used infrastructure built for landline phones.
Once corporations saw the money that could be made by offering those services , they adapted and improved and built new infrastructure specifically for use for these Internet connected devices.
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