Important People

The Internet would be nothing without the people behind it. With the new wave of two-way content, the people behind the Internet are now - more often than not - the average user. Sites like YouTube and Digg, founded by Chad Hurley and Kevin Rose respectively, allow users to create and decide what content they want the world to see. YouTube allows users to break into the video industry without becoming full TV professionals. Digg is a news site that allows users to pick the news stories that they think others would want to see and upvote them.The Internet changed the way we share and consume media. In music, the Internet allows users to find new music and gain access to it with ease. The MP3 file was a big step in doing so. It allows for high quality audio files to be easily distributed at a small file size. Shawn Fanning saw this and realized that people had MP3s that other people would be interested in. This motivated him to create Napster, a site where users could distribute music to each other for free. This began to cost the record industry a large amount of money due to the lack of royalties received from peer-to-peer sharing. However, the site also helped inspire other tech companies to create online music stores and later on paid music streaming services.