Introduction

Since the “privatization” of the Internet in the United States in the mid-1990s, the network of networks has developed rapidly. This has been matched by a wave of innovation in information technology, as well as in many areas of its application, giving rise to a multitude of on-line services and new “business models”. In the same period, the United States experienced unprecedented non-inflationist growth. As a result of this conjunction, certain commentators considered the Internet as the heart of a new growth regime, qualified as the “new economy”. This contributed to the creation and then amplification of a speculative bubble around businesses involved in the Internet.

As these unfounded hopes necessarily met with disappointment, the euphoria disappeared at the turn of the 21st century. At the same time, the forecasts of a certain number of economists were confirmed a posteriori. These forecasts had highlighted, firstly, that the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) does not lead ipso facto to an improvement in microeconomic performances (Brousseau and Rallet [1999]); secondly, that information goods and services do not escape from the fundamental rules of economics (Shapiro and Varian [1999]); and thirdly that American growth in the 1990s was not necessarily founded on the innovations linked to the use of ICTs exclusively (Gordon [2000], Cohen and Debonneuil [2000], Artus [2001]). However, these analyses do not claim that nothing changes with the large-scale dissemination of these digital networks and their associated practices.