Slashdot Mirror
Correcting the Record: the Government's Role In the Internet
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."
So it wasn't Al Gore?
Funded with tax payer dollars. You're welcome government. But your still not allowed to steal my freedoma!
Why repeat ourselves, we solved it yesterday, didn't we, with our original commentary?
Great, now we're going to start wasting our time with more who-invented-what arguing so govt can use that as an excuse to get carried away with CISPA and other bills, permitting them to do whatever they want because THEY invented it in the first place? Get real dude! Rubbish...
I was wondering how the editors even let the other one through as valid news...I think most of us here are pretty aware of PARC and how the gov really was responsible for the foundation of the internet...that said it did very quickly since evolve beyond that.
neorush
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.)
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
The WSJ never let the facts get in the way of a good story... especially when the story is so delicious to the yapping maws of Ayn Rand worshippers that make up their primary audience.
Because there's really not that much to say about such a ludicrous claim, and we said plenty.
It's just Fox News For The Rich i.e. conservative infotainment. There are more serious places to get financial news.
...you didn't build that!
The technical community may have invented the Internet, but it was the users who made it valuable by entrusting to it their time, money, and content. The users made a huge investment, and while that investment has paid off handsomely, let's not pretend that technologists invented all that valuable content.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
as James Holmes would say "government is bad... mkay" (he is from Colorado (the tea party guy, I am looking at you ABC), and what i know about Colorado is from south park)
lets keep our politics about vaginas, homosexuality and god... leave technology out of it, because unlike religion and politics we actually have facts and historically accurate records of technology.
B.S. Every single thing our elected government leaders have done is the result of people and the groups of people who are called corporations paying taxes to the government to carry out collective tasks, hopefully as efficiently as possible.
The government is just an extension of people who want to have a level playing field including the roads and bridges and such created and maintained so society can continue their daily business.
I always figured it had to be the government. Who else would invent something designed to spread viruses, botnets and prn? Who else would create a monopoly service with no accountability? Who else would create something to keep me paying over and over again for the same software? Who else would create a communications network that is so unsecure that it took a decade to figure out how to safely use it for simple payment transactions (and even now isn't all that safe).
The benefits to connecting computers are obvious. Had the government not created the internet, private companies would have created competing internets. At first it would have been networks of networks within single companies. The later companies that do business together would have connected eventually forming networks of companies that do related business. Then companies would have realized they can market to smaller businesses and eventually even computer owning individuals. An internet, or perhaps a few internets, would have grown up
And at each step of the way, viruses would have been intolerable. Companies running networks or internetworks known to have viruses or to be otherwise unsafe would be pariahs. Security and accountability would have been built in at the beginning. Competing internetworks would try different technologies with the best becoming more popular. What technologies would they have developed to make a better internet?
Of course we'll never know. The government jumped in and did it so no one else could.
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
It looks like both WSJ and Gartner have both long since jumped the shark. I was in university in the 80s. Anyone who was at large university in the 1980s would have been there to "watch the Internet happen", so to speak. BITNET, ARPANET, MILNET - how can these "reporters" (and yes, I used 'scare quotes' intentionally) hope to be taken seriously when there are plenty of people still alive who were there when the whole thing started? At least wait until most of us have died off before trying to rewrite history like that. Amateurs.
I don't feel the government invented the internet but they where the first to spec and implement an internet type network. More rightly I think they were just first to have a strong need for networks that where resilient to losing nodes. If they hadn't funded arpanet someone would have made something similar in due time. It might have taken a while but it would have come down the pipeline. I am certain that many people had the idea and would have been allowed to implement it as large computer networks got more common and more relied upon; people simple wouldn't tolerate large network outages due to bad weather or other adverse conditions effecting nodes. It may even have been invented simply because network admins would be to lazy to step up new network routes manual after a node outage. Pure laziness is why DNS and BOOTP where invented after all of course the automation made large networks manageable.
I think it is pretty obvious that ARPANet was the precursor to the internet and government funded research is responsible for the internet. But I do recall being sold home access to the internet as early as 1994, perhaps it was even earlier. By commercialization they must mean Al Gore's bill that allowed unsolicited advertising over the internet. Can anyone clarify this for me?
Were the merchants of internet connectivity in the early 1990's breaking some regulation?
PS I can't really say the WSJ Editorials have hit a new low. Their news articles have suffered under the new ownership, but their editorial pages have always been a haven for the reality challenged. I wouldn't be surprised to read that they full throatedly supported Mussolini, Pinochet, and Hitler.
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.
My guess is that the article that was written in the Wall Street Journal might have had an ulterior motive but I cannot fathom why the author would want to plug for Xerox - could Xerox have offered some money to the author for such statements? Does Rupert have a vested interest in Xerox somehow?. I've noticed a disturbing trend over the last decade towards revisionist history. Some of this behavior is engaged in by politicians as well as leaders of racist and paramilitary cults. As an example, Iranian President Ahmadinejinad denies the Holocaust ever happened. Hitler used to have a saying that a lie repeated often enough becomes a truth and this is quite an accurate observation. This is particularly scary. I used to think that much of this was just poor journalism but now I'm not so sure. It is fairly widely known that the TCP/IP protocol was developed by DARPA.
This firefox addon could have prevented the misleading slashdot submission that led to the submission of this correction:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/murdoch-block/
Gordon Crovitz lives in lower Manhattan around Wall Street. In fact, he lives near Zuccoti Park that Occupy Wall Street was camped out in.
During the occupation, Crovitz appeared in the local Community Board hearings to argue that OWS should be kicked out because they were making too much noise and disturbing his sleep. Most of the people who came before the Community Board supported OWS (First Amendment and all that), and the Community Board voted to support OWS and let them stay in the park, although they asked OWS to try to keep it quiet at night. Crovitz published a whiny editorial page essay complaining about it.
So Crovitz actually did say, "Hey you kids! Get off my lawn!"
Like other public goods, it makes sense for the US government to pay for basic research. And in the case of the Internet, the US government did. Unfortunately, that's a tiny fraction of the overall federal budget. In fact, while the US government paid for some of the research that formed the basis of the Internet, it also did a lot of damage. Packet communications, wireless communications, and digital online communications were being widely used by people such as ham operators and hobbyists for a long time, but were prevented from coming into widespread use by ATT's monopoly and FCC regulations. Without that kind of interference in the market, we probably could have had the Internet revolution 1-2 decades earlier. The cost of government interference was much higher than the small benefit of investment in research (since packet switching technology was being developed anyway.) And that's a microcosm of the political debate going on today. Progressives point to the benefits of a few percent of spending on public goods, spending that conservatives and libertarians generally have no problem with, and then try to use that to justify the remaining bloated budget consisting of entitlements, crony capitalism, and pork.
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."
Yesterday, Slashdot posted a piece titled Correcting the Record: the Government's Role In the Internet. It quoted an LA Times article with the different title by Michael Hiltzik. Hiltzik makes the claim that Xerox PARC did not play a key role in driving the invention of the Internet, giving credit instead to government research. Unfortunately, Hiltzik' article is wrong on many specific points, and he's also wrong in his key conclusion about the Xerox PARC's role. In a wonderful piece in the Fox News, Barbara Streisand corrects the corrected record. Streisand, who is the author of an excellent book, makes clear that Xerox PARC research was indeed the foundation for the Internet's success."
Grumman did.
Without the selling and usage the internet would have never been. Without contributing hardware and money to stay interconnected the ISPs would have just been isolated hubs. Before ISPs the internet was only a pipe dream. If AOL or companies like it had never existed the disinterest would have continued and the internet would have been a flop. Love it or hate the same goes for Microsoft and the computer.
In 1994, I stopped using BBS systems with Internet gateways and switched to a dedicated ISP. The ISP I switched to had been offering service to homes and individuals for a few years by the time that I switched.
The September that Never Ended was in, what, 1993? That was when AOL put in an Internet gateway. But even as far back as then, you could find local ISPs offering dial-up Internet connections.
But, here's the thing, we're talking about when the Internet was ``commercialized'' rather than when it was offered as a commercial service. For that you want to look at things such as the invention of web based advertising, online ordering, the invention of USENET spam, and so on.
Beause I hear nothing (literally nothing) about how government is ALWAYS good (in the USA I find on the internet), yet I hear lots and lots of EVERYTHING done by the government is ALWAYS wrong (and those cases where they cannot fit their ideology in it, as with Military Spending, is ignored as if it doesn't exist and was never asked).
So I wonder if your "ideologues on both sides" is actually the consequence and driver for "the way media has become so powerful" and "that Americans have become stupid". False equivalency and the unsupported meme that "somewhere in the middle" is the "right" place to be.
That company is using MY dime to build their stuff.
Therefore equally validly (i.e. none), everything done by a corporation belongs to the public.
(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.)
No profitable company, rail or otherwise, would buy Amtrak. No company could remain profitable while operating a national public transportation network. The only part of Amtrak that is profitable is the northeast, which has the urbanized population to support intercity trains.
Amtrak exists, and loses money, for the same reason that the Postal Service exists, and loses money, and the federal highway system exists (and also "loses" money, in the sense that the government has to pay for upkeep out of the general fund since gas taxes aren't enough.) They exist because large constituencies believe that transportation of people and goods are so important to the nation that the government should pay for them.
While we're giving the government credit for its role in the Internet, let's not forget to give them credit for IP laws, censorship, taxation, regulation, email snooping, surveillance, and all those other wonderful benefits we get from the government.
Make any claim you want. If there is no attempt to disprove the original claim, it will be declared the winner by default. If there is any attempt to prove how stupid the original claim is, it will be used to prove the claim "there is controversy surrounding the original claim". This is a tried and true technique in misdirection. Most of the time it is not even meant to convince the other side or to attract followers to your point of view. It is simply a method to hold people who already believe in your claims to continue the belief even when reality comes in, strikes them on the face and tells them their belief is wrong.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Private Corporations wrote the Constitution.
Seriously, we're now at the point where any fool can print a story and it gets accepted as truth by those willing to believe anything that fits their worldview/ideology.
Why don't these right wing nuts just combine their two religions into one and say "Private Companies Wrote the Bible and God is Private Companies" ?
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
If that is true, the lawless governmentless lands of Sudan, Afghanistan, Somalia and Northwest Frontier Province of Pakistan all should be humming with economic activity. Without the yoke of the government, they should be enjoying all the fruits of the free market capitalism. The United Socialistic States of America and the Ununited Socialistic Republics of Europe should be left in the dust, begging for hand outs and charities from these countries. I wonder why it has not yet happened.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Maybe that WSJ reporter was thinking ethernet, not DARPA's TCP/IP, and first simple WANs. Re: Al Gore's Internet inititatives, I was one of many network integrators in the mid-to-late 1990s that built several large-scale campus networks/MANs for colleges, high school districts, city and state govts - all made possible specifically by Al Gore's inititatives. Those were the boom times for technical and commercial innovation, creativity, and opportunity all around. Those changes also caused major telcos to take notice, accelerate their R&D in, and deployment of, fiberoptic infrastructure. Sometimes a country needs its government to kickstart and push through big changes. I give Al Gore's thoughts & opinions more weight than a Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck when it comes to big ideas, and important trends affecting humanity, the planet, and interpretations of scientific theories attempting to explain what is, and what we should be doing.
It wasn't just Paul Baran, of course, but the main concepts were invented/discovered in his series of papers from RAND at a time before anyone else was talking about such a thing (late 50s, early 60s):
Introduction to Distributed Communications Networks
- http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_memoranda/2006/RM3420.pdf
- distributed mesh network of cheap, heterogenous component parts (the topology is analytically derived as optimal for retaining connectivity after possible partition events), supporting wired and wireless links
- mail-like asynchronous address/packet-based routing of
- digitally encoded fixed sized data blocks (inspired by "Morse's code"))
- adaptive topology based on flood-filling neighbor/connectivity information throughout the network.
This was shelved for 5-10 years for being thought a bad idea by the AT&T engineers that DoD listened to at the time (they were designing progressively more monolithic hierarchical networks with very expensive switching equipment requiring very profitable professional administration), and was picked back up in the later 60s, when it was ironed out and then re-invented by many of the names now famous for it:
Here's an excellent discussion about this between Baran and Stewart Brand:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.03/baran_pr.html
The debate is clarified here too. But Obama really messed up with that line.
http://motherboard.vice.com/2012/7/23/dear-internet-whatever-you-say-you-were-invented-by-the-government
I'm sorry, Government funded? Tell me about the government's amazing ability to create money that doesn't come from a) you and me or b) in the form of debt?
The government can print money but it cannot create it with out a basis of value, no matter how tenuous, somewhere. The government doesn't fund anything with anything it didn't take from someone else.
How is it that few to nobody sees the truth? As a teenager knowing nothing of telephony, I cut into our phone lines to create a rather ghetto but function line to that new fangled modem (300 or 1200 baud - something like that). On that day, I built the fucking internet. And my parents built it by paying their phone bills.
I build the internet when I contract with ISP for faster service to work and upgrade our infrastructure of 50 networked devices (10 Mbit/sec --> 100 --> 1000 --> ???). I do this work and the company pays the bills.
I've programmed websites and pay externally hosted ISP bills as does my employer. If none of this was done by me, someone else would likely for much but not all of it. It won't be the government.
How is it that the government can take so much credit for the internet which has a relatively small footprint in the US? The network is what matters and the "thanks" is owed to countless individuals. Taking credit is just code for those who seek rent, control, and power.
Will they take credit when we have mesh networks? When you run a wire from this room to that, did Uncle Sam hold your hand? When you first setup a LAN for gaming, did government buy you the PCs, the interface cards, the wires, or design the game?
Why do you cede your own efforts to anybody?
Is government too big to stand on the shoulders of giants?
This whole concept is just one big exercise in "WTF!?".
Is the idea of the internet more important than the physical network? Who is really responsible for the idea? I don't think the government likes the idea of our two PCs connected without a little CIA man in the middle. I think their idea is 100% antithetical to the P2P nature of the internet. They want top-down when I want side-to-side. Not just centralized authority but centralized control.
It's so stupid, even irritating, that there must be one sole "inventor" of the internet. Anyone that actually understands what the internet is at a technical level can tell you it's comprised of many technologies from many parties. There is no sole inventor there are thousands, possibly even millions of people that have contributed their thoughts, knowledge, and expertise into creating what we know today as the internet. I'm not even counting the content (websites and programs built upon it), just the technology (hardware, algorithms, and protocols).
The Wright brother's are known for putting together the first airplane that could carry a human, that doesn't mean they invented the Boeing 747!
Sorry, but corporations, universities and governmental organizations were all using the Internet long before consumers became involved. If selling pet rocks on the Internet were still prohibited it would still be the backbone of our financial and information system. Porn would be a lot more expensive, though.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Holy shit. You're telling me the WSJ , Rupert Murdoch's mouthpiece, systematically and knowingly lied about near (and very well documented !!! ) history for the purpose of discrediting a wildly successful government initiative and substituting a false narrative?
Holy shit. Dog bites man! Hold the presses!
but things would still just have evolved because of causality, necessity and pure randomness
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?
I hope this gets modded up. Baran did indeed play a crucial role, and the interview with Brand should be must reading for anyone who cares about the history of these things.