Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine how the market potential for internet services interacted historically with the diffusion process of fixed line and mobile telephony. Design/methodology/approach – The authors evaluate the historical interactions between internet, fixed line...

This paper builds a theoretical argument of how the Internet increases the scope for disintermediation and analyzes the changes in the structure of transaction costs in the case of retailing. The paper treats the Internet as a low‐cost selling technology that needs substantial customers...