Chapter One
Introduction
The Internet began impacting on our
ordinary lives only in the late 1990s, with the development of the World Wide
Web (Gillies and Cailliau, 2000, Giovannetti, et’al., 2003). Since then,
the Internet has been used extensively for accessing instantaneous information
and communicating across geographical boundaries. Due to its characteristics of
speed, efficiency and economy, the Internet began to be applied increasingly
across industries ranging from retail and banking to the media (Giovannetti et
al., 2003).