3
a system within the world economy for extracting wealth from other countries and for
enforcing their ideas and social systems on the other countries. Wallerstein even
specifically notes that for this system to become a hegemonic situation the potential
hegemon’s products must be competitive even in the other core states (Wallerstein, 1984;
pg. 38). The Internet appears to match so closely to this theory that examining it on these
terms makes sense.
The logic of the system is that a core set of countries (one country makes it
hegemonic) provide some technological and organizational material to the less developed
countries of the world. These then form the basis for a system that exports cultural
artifacts and patterns through the system established while extracting resources from the
importing countries. The countries receiving material from the core form the periphery.
A middle tier of countries, that both import from the core and export to the periphery,
forms a semi-periphery and transfers resources from the periphery to the core. This
serves as a good starting point for describing the Internet internationally.
H
YPOTHESES
Core and Periphery
Wallerstein posited that a world system would be hegemonic when one country is
dominant overall in that system with no clear competitors. The first hypothesis is that the
United States is the core state under that condition. The reason for this is because while
Europe and Japan are very close in some aspects to the United States, they are not close
in all or even most aspects. There are no European countries or combinations of
countries that are major producers of all the physical components of the Internet.
Convention