Correcting the Record: the Government's Role In the Internet 257
TwobyTwo writes "Yesterday, Slashdot posted a piece titled Who Really Invented the Internet?. It quoted a Wall Street Journal article with the same title by Gordon Crovitz. Crovitz makes the claim that government research did not play a key role in driving the invention of the Internet, giving credit instead to Xerox PARC. Unfortunately, Crovitz' article is wrong on many specific points, and he's also wrong in his key conclusion about the government's role. In a wonderful piece in the LA Times Michael Hiltzik corrects the record. Hiltzik, who is the author of an excellent book about PARC called Dealers of Lightning, makes clear that government funded research was indeed the foundation for the Internet's success."
Government is good for jumpstarting tech/ideas (Score:4, Insightful)
Government is good for funding basic R&D and jumpstarting new technology and ideas. But then it should step out of the way, and handover the task to thousands of private businesses in the open market, rather than continue to hold a monopoly.
The internet is an example of a well-managed government project where the government stepped-aside when the time was right. (As opposed to other government projects like the Amtrak Monopoly that should have been sold to Conrail or some other profitable rail company years ago.)
Don't put the modem before the router (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Al Gore (Score:5, Insightful)
Before Al Gore got involved, there was little to no commercial traffic over the Internet (you couldn't sell anything). This was back when the NSF(?) was involved. Afterwards, you could start selling and interest in the Internet increased rapidly.
Did Al Gore create the Internet? No. Was he one of the people primarily responsible for making it what it is today? Yes.
Re:Government is good for jumpstarting tech/ideas (Score:5, Insightful)
(As opposed to other government projects like the Amtrak Monopoly that should have been sold to Conrail or some other profitable rail company years ago.)
What's the point in turning a government monopoly into a corporate monopoly?
You're aware that there can't be two railway networks on a given territory, right?
Opening the trains to competition, okay, but the tracks are a natural monopoly, and should remain under control of the People, through an entity that is accountable to it. A corporate monopoly isn't accountable to the People.
Re:Government is good for jumpstarting tech/ideas (Score:5, Insightful)
Although this may seem hard for conservatives to believe, there is such a thing as a government program that does its job well: The VA, for instance, manages health care with less overhead than either private insurers or Medicare. The US Coast Guard does a great deal of lifesaving and policing while operating on a shoestring budget. The Consumer Finance Protection Bureau recently published information on bad credit card companies with probably about 2-4 people (1 web developer, a webserver in a datacenter they probably already had, and a couple people to analyse the complaints).
Of course, contrary to what some liberals believe, not all government works well: DoD procurement is ridiculous ($5000 hammers aren't totally uncommon), highway projects are notoriously corrupt, and some agencies accomplish very little. But saying that all government is mismanaged is just as wrong as saying that all government is well-managed.
WSJ and Gartner (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:You don't say... (Score:5, Insightful)
The WSJ's editorial pages have long been a... special... zone untrammeled by any shreds of 'journalism' that might cling to other sections of the paper.
Honestly, the only thing that vaguely surprised me about the mindbogglingly stupid article we examined yesterday was that(per his CV) the author should have been smart enough to know better...
Re:Government is good for jumpstarting tech/ideas (Score:5, Insightful)
So Solyndra was the right idea (Score:4, Insightful)
f handing manufacturing over to private business is the right strategy, then Obama was on the right track when he tried to move solar panel production out of government-funded research labs and into private business production. While initially funded with start-up grants, Solyndra was to eventually produce and sell solar panels in the open market. Of course, nobody could have predicted that China would flood the solar panel market with Chinese-government subsidized, Chinese-made panels that no open market firm could compete with.
Still, Obama was on the right track to try to move production into private industry rather than create another federal agency to make solar panels. If solar panel production had remained a federal agency project, the production likely would have continued long after the Chinese dumped their own panels on the market, costing U.S. taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars more as the federal-run production would continue even when the market was unprofitable. As it was, Solyndra folded, as any private business in an unprofitable market should, and the loss to the taxpayer was minimized. Moving producing to Solyndra was exactly the free-market strategy that everyone asks for, and was the right thing to do.
Re:SO WHAT? (Score:5, Insightful)
This thing about some factions in the US hating everything the government does is incomprehensible in Europe. Some things a government does are good and some are bad but a conviction that everything must be either good or bad is obviously the sign of a failed intellect. How did your politics become so meaningless and manipulable by marketing exercises? Is it just the way media has become so powerful or is it that Americans have become stupid?
To my mind there are some human enterprises that would benefit from government funding. Finding drugs or vaccines to cure chronic diseases of the poor or gene patents would be a good start as both these areas are in markets with poor linkage to externalities. Fundamental research with no obvious application to commerce is another.
There are plenty of things governments are not very good at doing. Making things and delivering them to customers is one.
It is not at all surprising that the Government had a large role in creating the internet. A private enterprise would have invented something that could make much more money using the business models of the time. There wouldn't be any of this nonsense about allowing so much traffic that doesn't result in direct monetary transactions.
Re:Government is good for jumpstarting tech/ideas (Score:5, Insightful)
Not only does the VA manage health care cheaper than private industry, they do it better in terms of the results that count: keeping people healthier.
For example, the VA system does a lot of prostate cancer surgery. They just published an article in the New England Journal of Medicine (367:203 if you want to look it up) in which they found that surgery for prostate cancer (radical prostatectomy) in most cases doesn't really do any good. The price you pay is that half the men who get prostate cancer surgery wind up sexually impotent.
The VA system does a lot of research on outcomes of different treatments. For a lot of surgery, if you want to find out whether a procedure does any good, and you look up the research, it turns out that the VA did it. And some of the VA hospitals have the best results in the country.
In the private health care system, there are surgeons who rush everybody into surgery, whether they need it or not, because they make $10,000 or so for every procedure. In the VA hospital, they only perform surgery on those vets who actually need it.
Re:Al Gore (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Al Gore (Score:3, Insightful)
Which, funnily enough, is almost exactly what he said. People love to misremember what he said, and then hold them accountable for what they wish he said.
During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet.
I was actually watching that interview when he said that, and I nearly lost a mouthful of soda. He claimed to have created the internet. Read what you pasted above. I agree that he directed funding and supported it, but he did not create it.
And note that "initiative" in the statement above cannot be a "congressional initiative" because it's part of the idiomatic phrase "took the initiative". One cannot "take" a congressional initiative.
http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/take+the+initiative [thefreedictionary.com]
Re:Al Gore (Score:2, Insightful)
The internet would have happened with or without his involvement. Giving a politician any kind of credit is kind of ridiculous, IMO.
Re:Al Gore (Score:5, Insightful)
I read what I posted. He wrote the High Performance Computing Act [wikipedia.org], also known as the "Gore bill". It built off ARPANET and NSFnet towards a more general-purpose general-availability fast network. It also included funding for the NCSA, which used it to write Mosaic, which was really the jumping-off point of the Internet as we know it today. Marc Andreessen left NCSA to found Netscape, and as they say the rest is history.
The Internet is not NSFNet nor ARPANET. It's a logical evolution of those, and used many of the same technologies, but like most technical people you forget that there's more to an idea than simply the technology. Al Gore really was the guy who took the idea of a internetwork, accessible to all and used for everything, and made it a reality. Were it not for his efforts, there would still be internetworks, but they may very well not be general-utility and public-access. We might even have web browsers, but there wouldn't have been any money in writing them for a long, long time. It's a chicken-and-egg problem, and the government put the egg in the incubator on spec. A perfect example of government done right, really - which is of course why the Murdoch Street Journal ran the article.
Re:Al Gore (Score:2, Insightful)
In other words, Gore 'invented' the internet in much the same way as Thomas Edison 'Invented' the light bulb.
Edison did not invent the light bulb. They had been around for fifty years by the time he patented his.
Edison did not even invent the carbon element light bulb that he patented, it was invented by Joseph Swan in England. Edison's patents were eventually ruled invalid due to prior art. The carbon element version had even been 'invented' several times before Swan patented his.
Edison's electric company, along with George Westinghouse's competing company, did make electricity available as private utilities and this eventually led to the mass electrification of cities. This led to the usefullness of lightbulbs. Of course these private power companies were working hand in hand with local governments to obtain right of way using eminent domain for utility poles and such. It would have been much less profitable if right of way had to be purchased or rented through raising private equity. Oh darn, there's that nasty government again. It keeps cropping up in all our tales of private sector success.
Edison played a role in bringing lightbulbs to the public. Al Gore played a role in bringing the internet to the public.
Private funding is usually too focused on short term profits. It is good to have public sources of funding for societies' needs. Things like sewage treatment, roads, drinking water police and fire protection are worth the cost of government. One can only hope that someday all the fans of Atlas Shrugged are going to realize that those mighty empires of steel and coal they read about, the railroad companies, did not pull themselves up by their bootstraps. The government granted them land rights through eminent domain, thus funding their start up. It was help that was successfully lobied for by the founders of those companies, the same as lobbiests today seek to suckle from the government. If the railroads had had to raise private capital to buy the land they used, there would not have more than a few local carriers. Certainly no princley robber barrons. Of course the Rand fanbois would probably say that the government help was of no consequence ignoring or revising history.
Re:Al Gore (Score:5, Insightful)
For one thing, I doubt his vote was the deciding vote on the issue. It is impossible to quantify how much his advocacy increased the bill's vote count.
I suspect it would be more appropriate to say it's impossible for you to believe that Al Gore's advocacy helped. Frankly, the people who aught to know are convinced he played an important role. The accounts I've read all indicate that Gore spent a lot of time and energy making sure that bill passed. That's good enough for me, however, if you're a political weenie who can't give credit where credit is due, you might come to a different conclusion.