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."
Re:Al Gore (Score:2, Interesting)
His claim to have been affiliated with some committee that oversaw funding for ARPANet was correct. If Vint Cerf thinks he was an important early believer on the political side that's good enough for me.
Re:Government is good for jumpstarting tech/ideas (Score:4, Interesting)
There are two types of monopolies:
1) A company is so good at satisfying it's customers that it eliminates it's competition by providing value in the marketplace.
2) A company gets special privileges and favours from the government, including increased regulations of it's own industry. Because when you're a huge corporation with billions in annual revenue and a team of lawyers and lobbyists on staff full-time, complying with regulations that cost mere millions per year is a small tax in exchange for an environment in which it's impossible for start-ups - who only have mere millions in start-up capital to begin with - to enter the market and compete with you. Best part, your team of lawyers and lobbyists can actually be the ones to suggest specific regulations to the politicians who are in your pocket, so you get rules that are cheap for you to follow but prohibitively expensive for others. And those regulations are extremely easy to pass because as well all know, corporations aren't regulated enough!
Re:Government is good for jumpstarting tech/ideas (Score:5, Interesting)
Amtrak is the opposite: passenger rail in the U.S. was private for years (well, quasi-private, if we ignore the land grants used to build the rail lines). But with the decline of intercity rail travel, the rail companies wanted to get out of the business, and Amtrak was set up to consolidate and operate a rump service, mainly focused on keeping rural areas connected. The biggest proponents were actually the private rail companies, who wanted a clean exit strategy (aka dump the mess on the government). Congressmen/Senators representing rural areas were also large proponents of the plan at the time, as they were worried about losing their town's stop.
Conrail has no interest in running passenger rail, since freight is far more profitable. There are more or less three options.
One is to shut it down entirely.
A second is to break it up, leaving it to states to operate local portions if they want. This is slowly being done to some extent on the funding side, as Amtrak cuts routes but has a program where they'll agree to keep operating a cut route if a state wants to pay for it. For example, the Vermonter in Vermont, and two routes in California are now operated by Amtrak as contractor on behalf of the respective states.
A third is the Scandinavian option, of a publicly funded but privately operated system: the government draws up what routes it wants operated and at what fares, and then opens it up for companies to bid how much of a subsidy they would need to operate the system as proposed (this is the arrangement under which, e.g., Movia operates the Copenhagen bus system).
Government DIDN'T make it what it is today (Score:3, Interesting)
The key point here is that government didn't make it what it is today. Up until the mid 1980s, the commercial activity on the internet wasn't allowed. And for the next 25-30 years (hopefully longer) taxation stayed out of the equation. Anyone recall a government proposal to charge people for every e-mail sent? Just imagine where we'd be if that had be crammed down our throats. Government produces nothing. If you want to understand the real issue, ask yourself how many monthly fees you pay for things you don't use. Really look at all your monthly bills and add up the fees. And look at "basic charge" for stuff you don't use. Say you go on vacation for a month (6 weeks if you live in Europe). Even if you turned off the main breaker, main water line, main gas line to your house, you still pay those basic charges every month even though you're not using the product. Now imagine that a group of people comes along and says to you "We're going to start billing you every month for stuff you don't need and will never use. You have extra money. Suck it up." And then a year later they come to you and say "Remember that thing we're billing you for that you never use? Yeah, well our costs have tripled." "But why should I keep paying for that?!" you scream. "Well, we can't fire all those people we hired because unemployment will go up. And we can't cut their salaries or benefits either." "But I didn't agree to hire all those people or give them a raise!" you yell. "Tough. Cough it up."
Re:SO WHAT? (Score:4, Interesting)
Must.Dissect.Meme.
No, the federal government isn't toying around with bankruptcy.
Some states are raising taxes because of their long unfunded pension liabilities, which were used to cook the books. See the commercial version of this: United Airlines, for one
A few municipal governments are indeed filing Chapter 9s. Uniformly, these filings are as a result of long-term mayor vs city council funding issues.
Big infrastructure is not dead for now, and it never was. Let's kill the meme that spending is bad: it can do lots of good if there's a realistic expectation of an outcome, rather than peeing it down a rathole.
Yes, you might need to raise revenues through reasonable taxation: a fair share.
Re:Al Gore (Score:4, Interesting)
There wouldn't have been a vote without his advocacy. He got it to the voting stage.
As for government involvement crowding out private investment. That's an easily testable hypothesis. There are societies that spend a lot of government directed research and societies that spend little. The two tend to positively correlate not negatively correlate.
Even if the bill never existed, there is a real business incentive to invest research in science that can be used to increase worker productivity.
It was pretty unclear at the time that the internet was going to be a worker productivity tool, other than in marketing and advertising. Further there are lots of science ideas which might increase labor productivity not getting funding. So I think its fair to say the private market isn't funding all, most or even a substantial fraction of potential areas.