Welcome to the Tech Policy Podcast. I'm Evan Sportschropper. On today's show, small businesses and the

internet, while many people, and we talk about it a lot on this show, we think of the internet as having to do with major telecommunications companies.

You know, your Comcast, your Verizon's, your AT&Ts, those really large companies that build a lot of pipes and do a lot of broadband deployment.

But small and medium-sized businesses play a major role in the development of the Internet, and that's what we're going to talk about today.

So joining me to discuss this is Christian Dawson, Executive Director of the Internet Infrastructure Coalition.

Is that also the I-2 Coalition?

I-2 Coalition's their2 coalitions are nicknamed.

All right. Great. Well, Christian, thanks for joining the show. Thank you very much for having me.

I appreciate it. So, you know, bust the myth. The internet was built by basically large companies

and small companies. They innovate at the edge and they provide services in the form of apps,

but that's about it, right? It's just the big boys who built the internet. That's what I've heard. But as I have traveled through this industry,

as I've gotten to know it over the past two decades, I've met a whole lot of innovators,

and most of them are small to medium businesses. I am now friends with a guy named Barry Shine, I want to tell you about.

Barry Shine is the CEO still exists of the very first Internet service provider.

Just a couple of decades ago, it's called The World.

He'll tell you that he's the CEO of the world.

That's quite a title.

Yeah. And he had this idea that he's the CEO of the world. That's quite a title. Yeah.

And he had this idea that he was going to take internet access and he was going to sell it to people.

This is in our lifetime, you know, the internet has been such an incredible innovation, but the commercial internet is a couple of decades old. And it has been predominantly

driven by these small to medium businesses who had these crazy ideas that they were going to

try and monetize some little piece of it. And was he only allowed to do that after, what was it,

...