Hello and welcome to This Day, a history show from Radiotopia.

My name is Jody Avergan.

This day, summer of 2003, let's go to the still relatively early days of the internet, though

it is the aftermath of the burst of the dot-com bubble, and the idea of what the

internet will be and who it will be for still feels kind of up in the air. And here is a company

in the middle of it all that is getting more and more attention that decides the switch from

for-profit to non-profit status. That move, summer of 2003, was taken on by a man named Jimmy Wales. You

may recognize that name. He announced that his website, Wikipedia, would now be part of

the Wikimedia Foundation. So yes, I know in this intro I managed to take a very fascinating topic,

Wikipedia's role in society and frame it as a story of tax status. But that is indeed at the heart of why this story is so interesting, especially as we have now seen in the decades since how profit motives have skewed and twisted the way the internet does and does not serve us, the people. So here to discuss, as always, Nicole Hammer of Vanderbilt and Kelly Carter Jackson of Wellesley.

Hello there.

Hello, Jody.

Hey there.

And our special guest for this episode is historian and author Garrett Graff, journalist, former editor at Politico and Washingtonian, author of Books on Watergate, 9-11, D-Day, a bunch more, and now host of a new season of the excellent podcast, Long Shadow.

This season is called Breaking the Internet, and it's a kind of sweeping look at some of the

pivotal moments in the history of the Internet and how we got to this, I would say, very broken,

very divisive moment. So Garrett, congrats on the new season, and thank you for joining us.

It is a pleasure to be with you.

I want to talk about the large sweep that you take on throughout this multi-episode series,

but let's talk a little bit about this Wikipedia, Wikimedia moment.

So Jimmy Wales is born in Huntsville, Alabama.

He's kind of a serial entrepreneur.

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