Information technology and access to networks
Technological standards The Internet is a multi-layered network which is operated by a variety of participants. The Internet has come to mean a combination of standards, networks, and web applications (such as streaming and file-sharing ) that have accumulated around networking technology. The emergence of the Internet coincided with the growth of a new type of organizational structure, the standards committee. Standards committees are responsible for designing critical standards for the Internet such as TCP/IP , HTML , and CSS . These committees are composed of representatives from firms, academia, and non-profit organizations. Their goal is to make decisions that advance technology while retaining interoperability between Internet components. Economists are interested in how these organizational structures make decisions and whether those decisions are optimal. The supply of Internet access ...