| Sumario: | This article argues that the rise of the Internet as a mass infrastructure has to be viewed as an industrial and business experience. While the Internet may be breaking up the established ways of the old telecommunications and offering the opportunity for an open internetworking environment, the consolidation of the Internet access market as the central infrastructure of the information society and the new economy requires a transition in the sector's existing market, corporate, and institutional governance structures. It requires a shift in the development and deployment of the sector's network technologies and services and a change to the organization of the powers of control over its business processes. The Internet entrepreneur in the British Internet service provider (ISP) market has been defiantly driving an established albeit rapidly changing telecommunication industry in two ways. In so far as the Internet constitutes a technological opportunity and a fundamental impulse that sets and keeps the capitalist engine in motion, the Internet entrepreneur has furthered the gales of creative destruction bringing about the transformation of telecommunications networks. It has been an actor and a catalyst of the transformation of the sector's technologies, services, organizations, and institutions. Early entrants took the initiative of pushing unmetered access onto the market.
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