Why would anyone try to revise history, casting doubt on the verifiable fact that the U.S. government deserves credit for funding and helping create the Internet? Why would the Wall Street Journal publish this garbage?
Short, simplistic answer: because the mere existence of this article, published in a newspaper widely perceived as reputable, is "evidence" of debate about the government's role for all those politicians, ideologues, and other interests who want to cut government spending.
>Why would the Wall Street Journal publish this garbage?
It's part of the campaign to undermine Net Neutrality, 'deregulate' the Internet, and turn it over to the telecoms to run as they see fit.
If the Conservatives can convince the public that the private sector and unregulated free markets, not government, are responsible for creating the Internet as it now - a truly level platform where all comers have equal access to audiences and bandwidth (services like Akamai excepted) - then it's easy to make the case that Net Neutrality, common carrier, and all that stuff is just more government regulation that impedes progress and economic growth, or worse control what people do on the Internet.
Looks like a new front in the battle for the Internet.
Because a large contingent of Americans have taken a particular ideological simplification of one 1970's economics movement and turned it into a religion, rooted in faith, with the "invisible man... err hand" as its God.
> verifiable fact that the U.S. government deserves credit for funding and helping create the Internet?
Because it's NOT verifiable.
Some of us believe in historical determinism. Moore's Law meant that chips were getting better and cheaper. Telecommunications was growing. People were already using modems to build ad-hoc networks.
I argue that there was going to be an internet in the year 2000 whether or not the US government pushed a piddly amount of funding into Arpanet or not.
This is distinct from my take on rocket technology: I think that the market would NOT have perceived human spaceflight as worth doing, and if the US and Soviet governments had not pushed it, there might not yet be a person in orbit.
Reasonable people can differ on whether the US government "caused" the internet or merely jumped in front of a parade and then later declared itself the leader.
...but your opinion that one of these is "verifiable" is nonsense.
That's a completely different argument, though an interesting one to have. The WSJ editorial was not arguing that hypothetically the private sector could have created the internet, even though in actual fact it didn't. That's at least a plausible claim. But the WSJ instead argued, incorrectly, that the private sector did create the internet, without significant government involvement. The main justification seems to be a claim that Ethernet is an internetworking technology and was created by Xerox, and that ARPANET shouldn't be considered significant to this history. The article is very confused, and more or less just wrong, not making any sort of interesting point about historical contingency.
What the WSJ is trying to do here, and what you're doing by carrying their water is incredibly insidious.
You can claim that there would have been a global communications infrastructure anyway, but that ignores the vitally important question of what assumptions that network would rely upon, and who would push its growth, and to what (or whose) ends.
There's a Deep Space Nine episode which touches on an alternative to the universe we live in where global communications terminals in 2024 are locked down and require a license to publish to (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Past_Tense_(Star_Trek:_Deep_Spa... ). What stopped that from being our internet, instead of the internet we have now?
I certainly do not take for granted the government's role in shaping what our network looks like.
> what you're doing by carrying their water is incredibly insidious.
You lost points for assuming the worst possible motivation of my actions.
"Carry their water"? Meaning "To do someone's bidding; to serve someone's interests."
PLEASE!
First, this is tremendously insulting; it's not saying "you're wrong", but "I distrust you so much as a human being that I don't even trust that the words coming out of your mouth are your own - I ASSUME that you're on someone else's payroll".
Second, if you project this sort of thing on anyone who disagrees with you, you're committing a harm against yourself - you're assuming that you're on the force of good and light and those who disagree with your are not just wrong but are EVIL.
How likely are you to EVER correct an erroneous opinion of yours if you assume that everyone who disagrees with you is evil?
I've changed my opinions on tons of things (to ones that I think are more correct than my old ones), and a central tool to do that is not immediately assuming that the other side is made up of liars and stooges.
I've got an actual opinion, based on actual reading.
I was concerned that you might misconstrue my post, and for that I am sorry, I should have made my point clearer.
I am not making aspersions about your motives. I am perfectly willing to believe that you are sincere.
I might even be convinced that the author of the WSJ opinion piece is sincere (I at least lean towards the likelihood that he's probably using evidence like the proverbial drunk uses lampposts, i.e. for support rather than illumination). That does not change the insidiousness of his piece, or your defense of his piece.
I have serious problems with revisionism (the WSJ piece) or efforts to downplay its seriousness (your post).
Let's say that the assertion "An Internet would have existed in 2000 anyway, even if the government did nothing." is true. It's unverifiable, but let's assert it.
Even if it was true, _that's not what happened._ FedGov put money into Arpanet, which led to multiple academic (and a handful of corporate research) institutions putting time, money and organizational effort into creating the current framework. That much is known.
It theoretically could have happened some other way in some alternate timeline, but in this one it happened like that, and pointing out the possibility of an alternate history doesn't change the one we have.
This is a funny definition of "verifiable" that the commenter you are replying to is not using.
I argue that there was going to be an internet in the year 2000 whether or not the US government pushed a piddly amount of funding into Arpanet or not.
This is a bit like saying that the USA should not be credited as the first nation to develop and use a nuclear weapon because Nazi Germany would have done the same thing if it had survived long enough.
How is this not verifiable? The US government still has the receipts for the equipment they ordered and paid for through Arpanet. Most of the companies (BBN, Level 3) went on to be the very first companies on the internet.
And determinism is like religion, you really have to suspend belief to say this was going to happen because __??__.
If it rains this afternoon, and you later tell me that you did a rain dance outside ten minutes before hand, why should I assume that you caused the rain?
I don't see the connection between this, and your assertion that the internet would've happened by now anyways.
The US government funded (or provided funding for) many of the early developments that made the internet as we know it possible. As others have pointed out, the government also made it possible for the telcos to lay the infrastructure by providing them access to public lands and private lands (easements and eminent domain).
How would the companies have assembled the capital to acquire that land or land access themselves at that time? Keep in mind, unlike the Google Fiber announcement, the thing they were building had no demonstrated value as it does today.
In your painful analogy, you suggest that the spending and research and construction the government did or enabled was akin to tossing coins into a wishing well, and magically the internet came into existence. How does that fit with the facts that we have? Or do you also deny that anything in history is knowable?
> I argue that there was going to be an internet in the year 2000 whether or not the US government pushed a piddly amount of funding into Arpanet or not.
Indeed. How about Fidonet? Fidonet developed as a network of interconnected BBSes, starting from 1984 and widely accessible by about 1994, without government stimulus. Fidonet had a backbone and a hierarchical structure for routing messages. It's not hard to envision a world where telecommunications companies got into that business, providing dedicated high-speed connections and lines for Fidonet (becoming an FSP rather than ISP), so that it evolved from an asynchronous modem-based network into real-time connectivity. So what we call a website could have developed from the BBS rather than from gopher servers, and what we call a browser could have evolved from Telix rather than Mosaic.
There are many alternative ways a global network could and would have developed without US government initiation. But it's also possible that the US government stimulus made it happen sooner and more centralized to the US (some of Fidonet's development came from Russia.)
>There are many alternative ways a global network could and would have developed without US government initiation. But it's also possible that the US government stimulus made it happen sooner and more centralized to the US (some of Fidonet's development came from Russia.)
But none of those became what we use today. That's the key point here. You can argue that it would have happened anyway, or that some other network protocol or technology was superior and should have been used instead of what we use today, but that's not what the article is saying.
The research that was funded by ARPA became the baseline for what would become the Internet. That's what happened.
The republicans want to frame the presidential race as Big government vs. small government. "Romney wants to let the free market fuel America's success while Obama wants the government to your money and spend it how they see fit" Obama has recently tried to point out that the success of the free market in America has been dependent on the US Government. "Someone built the road and bridges and someone educated your employees, and someone built they internet that you use. Those things were funded by tax dollars." In this editorial this guy is hoping to convince people that the government was not responsible for setting the foundation of the internet.
As prominent libertarian thinker Julian Sanchez said on Twitter recently, "Look, I'd really love it if it were a myth that gov't created the proto-Internet, but it's just not... A decent working definition of dogmatism is the refusal to recognize that sometimes GENERAL truths have counterexamples." [1][2]
I recall someone saying once upon a time (this is a personal anecdote, not something from public history) that it would be in company's best interests to educate employees and therefore we should let the private free market handle education while altogether abolishing public education. I can't comprehend why anyone couldn't see how public education (or at the very least heavily regulated, all-private education) is an ultimate benefit to society.
You think 'government indoctrination' is bad now? How about when these corporations funding the schools start insisting that curricula be modified toward their own agendas? Or perhaps when they decide indentured servitude is the best way to get a 'return on investment' (i.e. we educated you/your kids for the last five years, you owe us five years of employment at reduced wages)?
But that's not actually likely to happen if education were entirely privatized. No, because corporations are focused on returns now and their numbers for this quarter and spending on education cuts into the bottom line and the ROI doesn't happen for two decades. Then, the schools realizing that everyone needs an education and it needs to be funded, start calling for taxes to pay for universal education...
It's a similar problem for pure research. No one knows if pure research will pay off. Ever. Sometimes, it pays off in fifty years. On odd occasions it pays off in less than ten. It seldom pays off in the next twelve months. Someone has to insist on pure research to move technology forward. Or we could all just stay like we are, use up our resources, and go back to living in caves.
"Someone built the road and bridges and someone educated your employees, and someone built they internet that you use. Those things were funded by tax dollars."
All of that's true, but it's also true that the guy who didn't build a business also gets to use those roads and the internet. It's also true that private spending on telecommunications infrastructure in this country utterly dwarfs public spending. And nobody serious is arguing we shouldn't have roads and bridges.
How any of this is a justification for $1T deficits and real marginal tax rates that will approach 50+% is anyone's guess.
It also sounded really bad coming out of the President's mouth. "I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. . It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something -- there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there." Hey, maybe being "so smart" and "working harder than everyone else" doesn't guarantee success, but at least most voters think those are pretty helpful in America, and may not appreciate anyone, least of all the President, sneering at them.
It sounded bad coming out of the President's mouth because he did a very bad job of paraphrasing Elizabeth Warren. Warren put it like this:
"I love small businesses. My daughter started a small business, my brother started a small business, my aunt Alice started a small business, I worked in it when I was a teenager. This is really about a basic question of fairness. And that is, when big businesses really make it big, should they get the special tax breaks so that they don't have to make the contributions to help support all of the basic infrastructure—you know, the roads and bridges and the schools and all those pieces, the basic infrastructure that lets the next kid make it big, and the next kid after that, and the next kid after that? You know, the way I see this, this is really about the basic question of how we build our future. The Republicans have given their vision of how we build our future—they've said, 'I got mine, the rest of you are on your own'. Our vision of how you build a future is that you make the investments forward, so every kid has a chance. That's what this is really about."
The Republicans have given their vision of how we build our future—they've said, 'I got mine, the rest of you are on your own'.
Which is, in turn, a poor job of paraphrasing the actual small-government view, which would be better stated as 'I was on my own, I made it, and you can do the same.'
And not all Republicans/libertarians have made it yet. For them it might be 'I haven't made it yet, but I will -- and so can you.'
Her line implies that the view is an asymmetric "benefits for me, but not for thee" philosophy, which isn't the case. It'd be great if more ideologues had enough confidence in their own views to accurately depict and dispute the opposition's, rather than relying on strawmen.
I think the GOP's voting record is enough to show that they can publicly proclaim support for public infrastructure, education, civil rights, and healthcare but then do exactly the opposite when it comes to legislation.
Sure. But now you're contrasting the philosophy with what politicians actually do in office. If your argument is that politicians engage in lying and hypocrisy, I don't think you'll find many takers.
But I sincerely hope you'd assert the same (with tweaked parameters) for Democrats.
'I was on my own, I made it, and you can do the same.'
With the reality:
'I was on my own, I made it with the assistance of resources that government provides, and you can do the same if we actually wanted to support that mode of government in the future, but we don't.'
Fair. What resources did the average Republican take advantage of that s/he now wants to kibosh? Axing roads and bridges is nowhere present in the public discussion.
Of Warren's cited examples, schools are the only plausible answer. To say that school is valuable isn't an insight, and to say that school can only be government-funded and -run is baseless.
An argument can be made that government does it the best, but it's disingenuous to say that because Republicans (along with everyone else, and forcibly) had public schooling, they give up their right to upgrade what they got, for the next generation.
I don't think anyone's talking about kiboshing at this point, we're at the earlier stage trying to justify future kiboshing.
Remember that the original discussion here is over whether large government institutions are beneficial to the public or not in the long run.
What tide of public opinion is changing where the editor of the Wall Street Journal feels he needs to write an editorial literally changing the history of the internet to convince people that large institutions were NOT involved in this information age and subsequent economic boom?
The Republicans have given their vision of how we build our future—they've said, 'I got mine, the rest of you are on your own'.
Now that's some thoughtful political discourse right there. Take the most draconian budget Republicans have even proposed, and you're still looking at trillions in spending for "the rest of you".
And anyone want to guess how big a % of the Federal budget "roads, bridges and schools" are? Next we'll have Federal candidates talking about firefighters. This isn't a serious argument.
I agree with you on infrastructure spending except for one nuance. Usually telecom companies laying down infrastructure are given rights of way and easements that make their jobs much, much, less expensive. That is to say, if we lived in a private property, capitalist utopia, laying down thousands of miles of fiber would be orders of magnitude more expensive and possibly completely intractable. Government plays a role here by suspending private property rights in lieu of the added value to the public where infrastructure is concerned. If you were to figure in the money saved to infrastructure builders by government, then the spending numbers would like quite a bit different.
Usually telecom companies laying down infrastructure are given rights of way and easements that make their jobs much, much, less expensive.
Is it traditional for states and localities to just give this stuff away? If they're not accepting competitive bids for the right to lay fiber, they're leaving money on the table.
Certainly when it comes to things like wireless spectrum, the Feds have auctions for billions of dollars.
Here's a pre-dot com crash article that suggests at least for some areas these rights weren't given away:
Can you elaborate on this? It seems to me that the proposal for restoring the highest bracket's marginal tax rate to what it was prior to 2001 would restore it to 39.6%.
One small point: at the income level where the 39.6% bracket applies, you are almost certainly itemizing deductions (especially if you live in a state with an income tax). In that case, every dollar of state tax paid is deductible for federal purposes, measurably lowering the effective combined rate.
There's a good argument for eliminating that deduction, as it effectively grants high tax states and localities a subsidy from the residents of low tax states and localities.
That being said, the deduction doesn't take away the full force of the tax. Some quick math tells me that 40% federal + 10% state - the deduction is a 46% marginal rate.
Medicare/Medicaid FICA has been uncapped since the '90's, and adds 2.9% or 1.45%, depending on how you want to count the employer "contribution". Next year for top earners it goes up another .9% to help pay for ACA.
So I don't think claiming marginal income rates are approaching 50% at the high end is unfair. Does anyone doubt that a popular "fix" for Social Security will be to uncap that tax as well? Then we'd be talking 60%+ if you discount the accounting fiction of the employer contribution. Or are self-employed.
I find the Republican perspective more convincing:
* Roads, police, schools, and other critical things that businesses need to thrive are mostly provided by state and local governments.
* Those critical things actually cost a pretty small fraction of total government spending.
* The exception to the above point would be the DoD, which could be seen as critical to the success of business, and DARPA which funds a lot of good research that businesses use. But is the lesson here that we need more defense spending? Or more DARPA spending? Or more basic research outside of the DoD?
* If the lesson is that we should have more funding for DARPA or basic research outside the DoD, then great. I'm 100% in agreement. It's a very small fraction of the budget now (I see DARPA is about 3.2B), so increasing it won't make a dent.
None of this seems relevant in the context of the very high federal spending right now. Very few of those dollars apply to the things businesses need to thrive.
And as for any moral argument, the people already paid for these things once, so it's not like something is owed any more than I still owe the grocery store for the food I bought. Yes, I will buy there again; and similarly, we shouldn't cut the government functions that are necessary for business to thrive.
But no, the Democrats at the federal level can't take credit for the police my city hired or the roads they built. And they can't use the success of DARPA to justify a bunch of things that don't resemble DARPA and cost much more money.
(For those wondering, I live in a Democrat-controlled city; and I have, when I felt it was appropriate, voted for city tax increases because I think they do a great job, notwithstanding an apparent monorail project[1]. So I'm not a "government is bad" kind of person.)
[1] That's a reference to a Simpson's episode, not meant literally.
Yes. If anything, the internet is a good example of the correct place for government and business. The initial research was publicly funded, and when it was up and running, it was handed off to private companies to manage, who compete to offer the best prices and service. (Of course, we'd all love to have more ISP competition, but that's a different subject.)
While true of Republicans, imo the quoted argument is equally dogmatic. Its not as though its used as a simple painting of Government as symbiotic; today's liberal arguments take it much further. Something like the following: "Government invented the internet. And without government, NO ONE would have invented the internet."
That, imo, is silly. PEOPLE invented the internet. There's time's and places where private investors are better at backing these people, and times when government forces are necessary. These blanket assertions that pumping money into either (without direction) will lead to improved innovation and economy are reductionist and, to a large extent, fundamentalist.
Its not simple. Investment is tough, and both sides get it wrong more often than right (that's the nature of business).
> today's liberal arguments take it much further. Something like the following: "Government invented the internet. And without government, NO ONE would have invented the internet."
The "free market" versions of the Internet were the walled-gardens of AOL, CompuServe, Prodigy, etc. I'm not sure if you've ever used them, but I did and let me tell you - they all sucked compared to the Internet, even in 1994-95.
IMO, that's an equally weak argument. "The free market's internet 20 years ago was terrible. Therefore, all conceivable free market plans for the internet could would have been draconion and awful."
To be clear, I'm not arguing the Government funds did not play the biggest role - or even that it wasn't the best solution available. It doesn't matter if it was. Im only arguing that pointing to an example of something invented under government funded research is not justification for blanket, undirected increase in government funding. But that's how that argument is used.
The article's focus is on the internet itself, which is the "inter-network" - the interoperation of individual networks. The first of these networks was ARPANET, which was developed by contractors by the request and under the management of ARPA (since renamed DARPA). ARPA proposed ARPANET in 1968. So the government's pioneering work in networking goes back further than this article discusses.
There is a complex history here; lots of people built on each other's work, inside and outside the US government and around the world. But it's silly to claim the US government gets no credit.
Of course, the government is always full of conflicting opinions. ARPA's funding of something so speculative and not specifically for military application had to be finessed and described in military terms to satisfy some congress members. But ARPA itself was created with the mission of advanced research after the Russians beat us into space with Sputnik, so computer networking was really quite well within its mission.
If anyone wants to learn more about this history, I recommend "Inventing the Internet" and "Where Wizards Stay Up Late." The former is a bit more academic and technical, but still easy to read, and the latter is a bit more focused on the people involved.
Here for 30 years the government had an immensely useful
protocol for transferring information, TCP/IP, but it
languished...In less than a decade, private concerns have
taken that protocol and created one of the most important
technological revolutions of the millennia.
Is Cerf's argument against the notion that it was private concerns that created the internet on top of a languishing protocol? That's valid, though it's certainly true that without the private sector investing in developing on top of the internet that it wouldn't be where it is today.
Government funded the basic R&D; industry commercialized it. Has there been any real controversy about the history? It doesn't seem so. It's just that some ideologues don't like some of the facts.
Let's see: 1975 (IIRC, TCP was somewhat later, but I'll be generous) plus 30 years would be 2005.
The Boucher Bill was 1992, prior to that commercial traffic was not allowed on the ARPA/NSFNET. Now, I wasn't around for the early Internet, since it wasn't particularly common until the mid '80's, but "languish" is not how I would describe what I saw. At that time, it connected every research and most educational organizations and did almost everything it does now except carry specifically commercial traffic. HTTP was not developed until the early '90's, and there was essentially no private interest in the Internet until HTTP had become prevalent, except for what it was already doing: email, news, and file transfer. And between the introduction of commercial traffic and infrastructural improvements which were part of the dot-com boom, the Internet did those three things significantly less well than it had previously.
So, yes it wouldn't be where it is today without private sector investing (particularly the massive infrastructure build-out in the late '90's). But "languish" for "30 years"? "Private concerns" created "technological revolutions"?
A little funding for basic computer science research is not big government. Bailing out banks and giving private solar companies loans is big government.
A "little funding", are you serious? DARPA is part of the freaking DoD.
Are you really going to criticize the government for investing in American companies of which a couple ones failed on a VC news site.
Yeah, companies fail. Yeah, the American government invests in American companies. Yeah, the American government can afford it. Right now the US treasury bonds that are indexed to inflation have negative interest rates[1]. Investors are _paying_ Uncle Sam money to take care of their money. The market is telling the government: invest, invest, invest.
"Are you really going to criticize the government for investing in American companies of which a couple ones failed on a VC news site."
I am. The government is not a VC firm. It's investment are invariably political and not business based. There's a huge potential for waste there, not to mention conflict of interest. A DoD project that happened to have civilian applications is a different beast entirely.
The problem can't always be left up to pure market forces, though. VCs do not fund projects that they don't believe will stand a chance of producing a large return. They may fund several ideas with a small chance, but a business that will provide for the greater good, cost a lot of money up front, and only provide small returns simply won't get funded. Sometimes government must be used to provide for the greater good or it won't happen at all.
The greater good is often politically based, it's true. It may not be business-based at all. Fundamentally, a politician can use any issue as a talking point, and certainly, a politician that funds an idea that creates something good will use that for their own gain or another's detriment. But simply because an idea is politically based doesn't mean it is not worth pursuing, or that the business world would do it any better.
In a way, this is what the government is doing in solar. Solar companies need to be funded and researched now before the market makes solar (and alternative energies in general) viable on a large scale. Right now solar is too expensive to produce and the price of oil gives little incentive to change habits. For the greater good, companies must be founded and research performed that will ultimately decimate the entire energy sector of the economy. Few VCs are going to be interested in destroying value, and yet we must do this before it is forced on us by the limits of the natural world.
It is not a perfect vehicle but only the government has the pockets and patience to make that happen. Some will fail. That does not mean we should never try though. That means all those on the sidelines cheering for government failure should instead try to assist with better solutions and better oversight. Most are happier to criticize and make sweeping judgements though.
It's not a matter of free markets, it a matter of corruption. Solyndra's business model as a company was provably unsound years before it emerged as scandal but it still received funding from the government because people believed in the idea of a solar company. The thing is that Solyndra ended up not actually contributing much to solar as a business or technology because their source of income was based on politics and not on making solar power workable. Seeing as Solyndra's founders were politically connected, it looks a lot like the real driving motivator here was political back-rubbing and not actual improvement to alternate energy technology.
If you want the government to fund scientific advancement so that alternate energies can become reality, that's one thing, but the government shouldn't be funding provably unsound companies just because they happen to be in a popular field. It's comparable to investing in Pets Dot Com because the Internet is the new thing.
At best government funding of industry won't actually improve the industry and will just be a colossal waste of money. At worse, it will be yet another avenue for politically connected connected millionaires to get free public money put into their private ventures.
Heh, well, the private sector is immensely corrupt, too. Witness the news from Wall Street on just about any given day. It's not fair to point to one thing the government screwed up and say that government is wholly corrupt. It is imperfect but we're supposed to be working towards a "more perfect union," not that we had achieved it already.
The great thing about government is we can involve media, we can send FOIA, and we can scare politicians into doing the right thing if necessary. If government corruption was as bad as you seem to think, Solyndra would still be getting paid and none of us would know about it.
No, no. It's one thing if crooked business men steal from and lie to one another, it's another entirely if Congress, which is supposed to prevent that (on at least some level) has an active interest in those lying and cheating business deals.
The problem isn't that the government is currently actively corrupt (it isn't for the most part,) it's that the more it get's involved in the economy as member rather than a governing body, the more motive individual government members and workers have to be corrupt. We have an active free press and law enforcement agency which catches corruption but that's not a good reason to create conflicts of interest where there shouldn't be.
Hm, well I see your point. Direct investment in companies is risky for everybody, governments and individuals.
But what else is there? How is government supposed to create the right conditions for a market solution? The solution was supposed to be carbon credits by making using polluting materials gradually more costly over time and thereby creating the conditions for clean(er) energy to be viable in the market. But that was rejected outright as a "tax."
Government as a member in the market is bad, we can agree there. But outside of direct investment, it gets politically difficult to change anything.
More to the point, the government is not horrible at funding basic research (although I think there's a case to be made that it leads to some academic pathologies) and it can occasionally even be good at building basic infrastructure. But this debate is in the context of Federal government spending, and research and infrastructure are only tiny, tiny parts.
US Federal Budget is dominated by 3 things: Defense, Medicare, and Social Security. The research arm of the DoD makes up a pretty small part of the Defense budget, and the last two, Medicare and Social Security, are both (inter-generational) redistribuions. So this whole argument over the internet is really just political stupidity, both for liberals who hold it up as an example of how effective Federal spending can be, and conservatives who want to re-write history.
Yes. I was fascinated to learn recently that, as Cerf says, Ethernet was based on a broadcast network in Hawaii. Two interesting things about that:
1) Networking between local machines came after larger, more distributed networks. This seems odd to us who might walk around with 3 computers on our person, but in those days, you might have 1 computer per institution, and networking's goal was to allow better sharing of those scarce resources.
2) The Ethernet method of "broadcasting" every message to everyone on the network (absent a switch to filter traffic for individual hosts) seemed odd to me when I first heard it, but there's no other way to do it in a radio network, which is what Ethernet was based on.
Here's the thing about this entire debate: who gives a fuck?
Yes, the government, the private sector, and academia (which is funded by both government and the private sector) all had a hand in developing the technologies that collectively comprise what we know today as the internet.
But this debate isn't really about the internet. It's about the role of government and what constitutes a fair tax rate, which are two separate but related questions.
When Obama talks about roads and bridges, or public education, or the internet, or whatever, what he's really saying is 'see all this awesome stuff government has done for you? You really owe us more money.'
That might not be complete and utter bullshit if (a) government actually spent more than a tiny fraction of its revenue on those things and (b) if it wasn't an abject failure at everything else.
Instead, the large majority of government spending goes to wars of aggression, debt service (aka extortion payments to major banks, or embezzlement, depending on how you look at it), and Social Security. As we know from the Bush Sr. era, Social Security is completely fucked. Much like the briefcase full of IOUs at the end of Dumb & Dumber, there isn't a single, actual dime in the program, because Congress has borrowed against every last one.
Which brings us to the fundamental stupidity of what Obama's suggesting. And, seriously? We should give these people more money? Fuck you, sir.
"Gordon Crovitz is a media and information industry advisor and executive, including former publisher of The Wall Street Journal, executive vice president of Dow Jones and president of its Consumer Media Group."
"BUT EVERYONE ELSE IS DOING IT!!!!" is not an excuse you'd accept from a child, so why does it become an acceptable defence in politics and journalism?
Your comment seemed quite sarcastic, and looked to be trying to equivocate responsibility. Not that I'm above using sarcasm myself, obviously.
The fact is, that in this instance, a Murdoch owned media company is clearly distorting the truth to further a political agenda. So in this instance, it is perfectly reasonable to criticise Murdoch in particular, without having to resort to qualifications.
This just goes to show that the Republicans are the Stupid Party. They should be embracing this! The Internet is but one of the many wonderful fruits of the military-industrial complex. Who was President when the Internet was created? Nixon/Ford! None of this would have been possible without close collaboration between the military and private industry, so we should give more public money to both of them.
Personally, I believe that the Internet, as we know it, is a product of the ARPANET, the BBS communities, the UUCP communities, and the divestiture of AT&T.
And Al Gore invented the internet. Seriously, he sponsored the legislation that set up and funded the internet as a separate entity from NSFNET and (D)ARPANET. More government meddling that benefited no-one.
That's merely administrative partitioning, though. On the wire there's one big reachable address space which predated his involvement, and the creators' names appear on RFCs.
The U.S. government, including ARPA, NSF, DOE, NASA among others absolutely facilitated, underwrote, and pioneered the development of the Internet. The private sector engaged around 12 years into the program (about 1984-85) and was very much involved in powering the spread of the system. But none of this would have happened without this research support.
I have great faith in the human ability to trench forward and evolve solutions to problems as well as innovate. This also leads to a belief that if person A does not invent or discover something then B, or C, or D eventually will invent or discover that same thing. Proof of this exists across many fields where nearly simultaneous discoveries or developments happened across the globe (powered flight?).
It is clear that the interconnected network of computers that ultimately became the consumer Internet had its roots in a number of government-sponsored programs.
At the same time, interconnected networks of USERS had already existed for quite some time. Examples of this were Compuserve and AOL, the myriad of BBS providers across the world and services like Minitel in France.
It was this existing audience that provided the early adopters that made the Internet take off as a commercial product. Government couldn't have done that.
More to the point: The US Government couldn't have made the Internet a commercial success available in every home and every city of the world. It was entrepreneurial drive across the globe that made this happen. If the US Government had kept control of it all it would have remained at a level and a scale not useful to anyone but a few literally well-connected sites.
So, yes, kudos for letting go. Here's a perfect example of government getting the hell out of the way to see private enterprise take something well beyond anyone's imagination.
I wish they'd do that with a myriad of other areas that government touches that would do far better in private hands.
The Internet is a massive example of why government should not be involved in our activities beyond a very basic level. We can do a far better job.
Getting back to the invention and discovery issue. I have no doubt that the Internet would have been developed privately if the government had not had any involvement whatsoever. It would have been different, or not, but the human drive to innovate and invent coupled with the equally powerful drive to connect, share and explore would have made it happen. It really isn't too far of a stretch to see that BBS systems would have sought to create more efficient and scalable topologies to reach and service more people. And, as computers and technology evolved this would have pushed the need for speed in order to provide media services.
Short, simplistic answer: because the mere existence of this article, published in a newspaper widely perceived as reputable, is "evidence" of debate about the government's role for all those politicians, ideologues, and other interests who want to cut government spending.