Today -- following housing bubbles, bank collapses, and high unemployment -- the Internet remains the most reliable mechanism for fostering innovation and creating new wealth. The Internet's remarkable growth has been fueled by innovation. In this pathbreaking book, Barbara van Schewick argues that this explosion of innovation is not an accident, but a consequence of the Internet's architecture -- a consequence of technical choices regarding the Internet's inner structure that were made early in its history.

The Internet's original architecture was based on four design principles:...