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Building and Delivering the Virtual World: Commercializing Services for Internet Access
Author(s) -
Greenstein Shane
Publication year - 2000
Publication title -
the journal of industrial economics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.93
H-Index - 77
eISSN - 1467-6451
pISSN - 0022-1821
DOI - 10.1111/1467-6451.00130
Subject(s) - the internet , business , internet access , service (business) , telecommunications , product (mathematics) , service provider , internet service provider , internet privacy , marketing , computer science , world wide web , geometry , mathematics
This study analyzes the service offerings of Internet Service Providers (ISPs), the commercial suppliers of Internet access in the United States. It presents data on the services of 2089 ISPs in the summer of 1998. By this time many ISPs had begun to offer services other than basic access. This paper develops an Internet access industry product code which classifies these services. Significant heterogeneity across ISPs is found in the propensity to offer these services, a pattern with an unconditional urban/rural difference. Most of the explained variance in behavior arises from firm‐specific factors, with some evidence of location‐specific factors.