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!
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"
...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.
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.
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...
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.
Ok, so government has a definition and a composition. What's wrong with using the word "government" as short hand for that exact concept?
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.
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).
All of which happened after the Internet went commercial.
No colour or religion ever stopped the bullet from a gun
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.
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."
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.
That's a lovely, romantic idea, but if you look at what government does today it spends dramatically more of our tax money to provide windfalls for corporations than it does on anything actually positive. Of course, I say this as a resident of a state whose roads are failing partly because we pay more to the federal government than we get back. California is pretty tired of bankrolling bullshit that we can't afford for other states that contribute less. Meanwhile, I'm pretty tired of tax money being used to spread American imperialism.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The government is just an extension of people?
I don't think the NSA/DIA was thinking of "people" when they rolled out COINS (Community On-line Intelligence System) from around 1965/70
The US gov knew data storage was the future and saw the issues most of the West was having with massive amounts of secret data entry.
The US gov understood their communications system, their digital data moving on their networks.
The rest of the world was still playing with digital entry of old physical card indexes - and not in real time.
US intelligence had the vision of access to each other's computerised files from around 1965.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
...all of which happened on non-government networks long before the Internet went commercial.
Viruses and warez just use whatever transport mechanism is available.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Fair enough, and in support of the point I was trying to make, which was the government didn't create the Internet to spread viruses et al.
No colour or religion ever stopped the bullet from a gun
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.
Your hindsight suffers from macular degeneration.
The eagerness for private companies to jump on the Internet to market to end-users is historical fact. Given such demand, why did not private companies create such a secure and accountable internet? Were the benefits not so obvious? There were, and are, privately-managed internets connecting companies (been there, done that, in the late '90's). The free market operated, just not like you expected, because "free marketers" usually fail to take into account that land-lines require laying cable on/in/over public lands, which requires franchise, which requires scale, which led to tiers of service providers and ISPs.
As for competing technologies, the ultimate government-sponsored protocol set is the OSI stack. It competed with the US DARPA/University Researchers/Private Company derived technology and lost, now existing mostly as concepts (compare to an 7-Layer Taco Bell burrito -- google it), and impinges on us in the form of LDAP and Microsoft Exchange.
Well, apparently, you only have to fool the majority of people for a little while.
Perhaps it would have been better to keep the internet a government run system only for a small group of users instead of opening it up to everyone. Then the competing networks would have been free to borrow technology from the government's system while at the same time developing their own and competing with each other for safe secure computing, and the government's system with its small user-base would be safer from those who would misuse it.
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.
Fair enough, and in support of the point I was trying to make, which was the government didn't create the Internet to spread viruses et al.
They didn't create it for that purpose, but because they didn't create it in a commercial environment and let it grow and compete, they also didn't create it to prevent viruses and botnets. They built it with all the scrutiny and detail of an academic project, not the scrutiny and detail of a commercial product.
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.
Your hindsight suffers from macular degeneration.
The eagerness for private companies to jump on the Internet to market to end-users is historical fact. Given such demand, why did not private companies create such a secure and accountable internet? Were the benefits not so obvious?
Doing it right takes time, and it usually takes trial-and-error. In most new industries there are quite a few attempts that fail, sometimes because the technology and the market aren't ready yet, sometimes because the because a company doesn't do things right.
There were, and are, privately-managed internets connecting companies (been there, done that, in the late '90's). The free market operated, just not like you expected, because "free marketers" usually fail to take into account that land-lines require laying cable on/in/over public lands, which requires franchise, which requires scale, which led to tiers of service providers and ISPs.
Remember modems? Computers can actually talk on phone lines. Part of the build up of technology is to use what's there. As demand increased the cooperation with government needed for new cable in public and private lands would have come - and it would come when the industry was ready for it.
As for competing technologies, the ultimate government-sponsored protocol set is the OSI stack. It competed with the US DARPA/University Researchers/Private Company derived technology and lost, now existing mostly as concepts (compare to an 7-Layer Taco Bell burrito -- google it), and impinges on us in the form of LDAP and Microsoft Exchange.
So there was a little bit of competition. What about all the other competitors that never were because they were pre-empted?
Remember Atari and Odyssey? They were a little bit of competition too. One was better than the other. Imagine where video games would be if we had decided at that point that we were done, that Atari was the standard for all future video games.
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.
they didn't create it in a commercial environment and let it grow and compete,
Are you lying or ignorant? I'm inclined to think that it's a healthy mixture of both.
There were many competitors to the internet, such as UUCP, BITNET, X.25, Minitel, CYCLADES, Frame Relay, plesichronus POTS, BBSs and so on. The internet won in the face of stiff competition. Hell, BITNET was still growing in the early 90's and UUCP was still pretty popular.
They built it with all the scrutiny and detail of an academic project, not the scrutiny and detail of a commercial product.
I honestly can't figure out if you're trolling or stupid.
Microsoft Windows was built with the scrutiny and detail of a commercial project.
BSD was built with the scrutiny and detail of an academic project.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Ok, I'm confused. Was there so much competition that an internet would have been built and deployed with or without the government, or were there so few other competitors that nothing would have happened without the government?
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.
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
This is the sentiment that I have a very hard time understanding. It is almost like you believe you are fighting against some sort of God or Supreme being that is "the government." I guess that makes sense, since conservatives actually worship the free market like a God (or a false idol - ironic that is the religious conservatives doing that). That is why they are always talking about the "invisible hand of the market" (God's invisible hand? Maybe they believe that God actually controls the free market).
Progressives, on the other hand (this one is figurative, not invisible), have faith in the ability of people to work together for the good of the whole. That is what government is. It is not some maniacally laughing evil force in a dark room somewhere. It is a social contract where the people pool their resources (money) and freedoms (agree to submit to laws and regulations) to make an environment that everyone benefits from.
Conservatives are arguing against government (or collectivism). That is why this article from the WSJ was made. To try to say that there is NOTHING that government does to help our economy. Progressives (in the US at least) are not arguing FOR government (at least not like conservatives are arguing against it). I do not know of any progressives that want everything to be government controlled. I do know of conservatives who are arguing nothing should be government controlled, and they have a sizable following (libertarians).
I have always believed that all of these things are just tools, and that you should always try to use the best tool for the job. Capitalism and free markets are very efficient and powerful tools when they are used in the right situations. But, collectivism (public infrastructure, public investment) can be a more efficient tool than free markets in other situations. The problem I see is the conservatives have become ideological in this argument. I would expect that in an honest debate they would believe that private solutions would be more effective for more things than I would (or that in solutions that require a mix of public and private they would lean more towards the public side than I would). But, the argument recently hasn't been about where we draw the line between public and private. Conservatives have started to believe that public solutions are NEVER a proper tool, that private solutions are ALWAYS the correct solution. This is just ideology, not reality. The method by which the internet was created support that.
Ok, I'm confused.
It happens easily, especially when you refuse to recant absurd philosophies which fly in the face of actual verifiable facts.
Was there...
Almost certainly the former, given that there were other internetworking schemes of sorts in competition. There was stiff competition from other governmental and commercial and mixed sources.
But: government funding created the best solution, even though the free market was there and in operation.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
There was so much competition that nothing would have happened without the government.
There's nothing like $HOME
Sometimes the government does provide the best solution for something. It's not impossible. It's just that when government doesn't provide the best solution we usually end up paying for it long after it is clear it isn't the best solution.
I still think the solution would have been better had it been created by someone else. I don't say this because the initial technology would have been better - but because the continuing need for improvement. With the internet, no one is accountable for viruses. Had the internet been run by a for-profit private company, the viruses would hurt their profits and cause them to find solutions - in some cases solutions that only the owner of the network would be capable of implementing.
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.
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.
I always figured it had to be the government. Who else would invent something designed to spread viruses, botnets and prn?
Microsoft Windows and Novell network equipment in computer labs were doing this long before they got hooked up to the internet.
Who else would create a monopoly service with no accountability?
Again, Microsoft, to name one. Government tried breaking that monopoly up by holding them accountable to antitrust laws and fair business dealings, the next government halted that effort in its tracks.
Who else would create something to keep me paying over and over again for the same software?
You mean like annual fees and software "upgrade assurance" for various software and services, including Windows at the corporate level? I'm not even sure what "software" you're talking about that you're paying again and again, just to connect to the internet.
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).
Simple payment systems were not a design goal of the original, non-commercial internet.
And I'll throw up Microsoft as an example again of how a multi-billion dollar private enterprise that fits your description. Almost all the Internet-based malware attacks would have worked just as effectively even if limited to a large LAN (botnets and C&C systems are an obvious exception), because of the swiss-cheese security of Windows back in the day.
For example, "net send" was a great tool for sending simple messages to someone on a Windows network... except if you didn't specify a recipient, it sent to ALL computers on the local network (a very stupid default, who was the genius who thought that up?). Someone at the company I worked at in 2000 sent a fake virus warning as a joke, but forgot to include his coworker's computer name. Thousands of employees saw it, and IT was flooded with panicked calls. IT was understandably pissed. Actual malware started exploiting Messenger service vulnerabilities not long after, and Microsoft finally disabled it by default in WinXP SP2.
It is not "the Internet's" responsibility to stop malware, any more than it is a telephone system's responsibility for catching and preventing phone fraud.
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.
The "best" becoming most popular and beating out inferior competitors? The more/most *popular* technologies are rarely the "best" even for its time. Windows; monitors limited to 1920x1080 pixels regardless of size; the iPod; VHS tapes; mp3s; Internet Explorer; etc.
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.
And thank goodness they did, and the protocols and language for the world wide web were made available freely without license instead of held by a private companies, otherwise the modern "internet" after a half dozen corporate mergers would be as barren a wasteland as cable TV, despite over 500 channels, and online freedoms would have been locked down and restricted far earlier.
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
Sometimes the government does provide the best solution for something.
OK...
It's just that when government doesn't provide the best solution we usually end up paying for it long after it is clear it isn't the best solution.
Kind of like IE6 then?
With the internet, no one is accountable for viruses.
Most of the viruses propagate on Windows, for which a commercial entity (Microsoft) is accountable. Large amounts (most?) of the infrastructure runs on Linux, yet there is not the same proliferation of viruses.
Basically all of you criticisims can easily be levelled at private companies equally well.
Had the internet been run by a for-profit private company, the viruses would hurt their profits and cause them to find solutions - in some cases solutions that only the owner of the network would be capable of implementing.
Again, the facts do not support your position. Most of the problem is with Windows. For a time, during the worst years, MS almost could bend the internet to its will, or at least bastardised versions of important protocols. That didn't help, in fact that did more harm than good.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
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
...because they didn't create it in a commercial environment and let it grow and compete, they also didn't create it to prevent viruses and botnets.
So where is the commercial entity that has developed a network that is immune to malware? Alternatively, what is your proposal for a network with such an immunity.
Take your time, we'll wait.
Sometimes the government does provide the best solution for something.
OK...
It's just that when government doesn't provide the best solution we usually end up paying for it long after it is clear it isn't the best solution.
Kind of like IE6 then?
I chuckle as I read this on my non-IE browser.
With the internet, no one is accountable for viruses.
Most of the viruses propagate on Windows, for which a commercial entity (Microsoft) is accountable. Large amounts (most?) of the infrastructure runs on Linux, yet there is not the same proliferation of viruses.
Windows gets infected, but the propagation occurs on the internet. If you use Windows stand-alone, you don't get infected. And you can always go with Linux or Apple.
Microsoft has made some efforts to prevent infections. They largely haven't been successful but they have made quite a few efforts. But what owners of the internet have made efforts to virus-proof the internet?
Basically all of you criticisims can easily be levelled at private companies equally well.
With private companies I can do something about it - I can buy a competitor's product.
Had the internet been run by a for-profit private company, the viruses would hurt their profits and cause them to find solutions - in some cases solutions that only the owner of the network would be capable of implementing.
Again, the facts do not support your position. Most of the problem is with Windows. For a time, during the worst years, MS almost could bend the internet to its will, or at least bastardised versions of important protocols. That didn't help, in fact that did more harm than good.
Windows is most infected largely because it is the most popular and therefor the most targeted. But the propagation of those viruses is on the internet.
And people do have choices. How many times do you read on slashdot that people are using Linux or Apple to avoid viruses. I bought an Ipod rather than an Android precisely because I didn't want the viruses. I don't like that I can't program the thing, but given how badly run the internet is I figure Apple's restrictions on what goes on the device is the only way to keep my sanity.
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.
Your hindsight suffers from macular degeneration.
The eagerness for private companies to jump on the Internet to market to end-users is historical fact. Given such demand, why did not private companies create such a secure and accountable internet? Were the benefits not so obvious?
Doing it right takes time, and it usually takes trial-and-error. In most new industries there are quite a few attempts that fail, sometimes because the technology and the market aren't ready yet, sometimes because the because a company doesn't do things right.
The point I was trying to make is all that was too much risk for private companies to undertake at the time or else they would have -- and some did.
There were, and are, privately-managed internets connecting companies (been there, done that, in the late '90's). The free market operated, just not like you expected, because "free marketers" usually fail to take into account that land-lines require laying cable on/in/over public lands, which requires franchise, which requires scale, which led to tiers of service providers and ISPs.
Remember modems? Computers can actually talk on phone lines. Part of the build up of technology is to use what's there. As demand increased the cooperation with government needed for new cable in public and private lands would have come - and it would come when the industry was ready for it.
Heh. My home email address is > 25 years old. I remember modems. That aside, what you describe is exactly what happened, especially the "use what's there" part. Even in the modem age, cable TV was ubiquitous. Who runs one of the largest nation-wide networks these days? Comcast.
As for competing technologies, the ultimate government-sponsored protocol set is the OSI stack. It competed with the US DARPA/University Researchers/Private Company derived technology and lost, now existing mostly as concepts (compare to an 7-Layer Taco Bell burrito -- google it), and impinges on us in the form of LDAP and Microsoft Exchange.
So there was a little bit of competition. What about all the other competitors that never were because they were pre-empted?
It is not the government's fault that private companies have not [yet] come up with something to displace the IP of TCP/IP, as /IP displaced, say, the perfectly workable X.25 packet-switching technology, or XNS. Innovation with the common transmission mediums is thriving, and the Ethernet of today doesn't at all resemble that which competed with and won over ARCNet and token-ring.
Remember Atari and Odyssey? They were a little bit of competition too. One was better than the other. Imagine where video games would be if we had decided at that point that we were done, that Atari was the standard for all future video games.
I don't understand your beef. The government funded some technology development, and later put it out there for the private industry to use and expand upon as it would. That is not at all like Europe mandating GSM for wireless, whereas the USA left all the carrier technologies to battle it out in the consumer market. I am sure you approve of the latter, but please recognize the difference between the two cases.
Well, apparently, you only have to fool the majority of people for a little while.
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 think we should let the Red States secede, and use the money saved to fix our own infrastructure instead of theirs. Except for the abolition of slavery prosecuting the Civil War was a mistake on the part of the Union. The Confederate States have been nothing but a drag on the rest of the country ever since. (Yes, I'm exaggerating, but not much.)
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
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
I chuckle as I read this on my non-IE browser.
Clearly you are not a web developer. If you are then you would know the immense pain and suffering and cost that IE6 has caused. All caused by a private company.
But what owners of the internet have made efforts to virus-proof the internet?
The internet doesn't get viruses. The core routers, and most of the servers don't get viruses. What gets viruses are the Windows computers.
Imagine the internet is largely run by private companies, which shoudln't be hard, because it is. Why would private companies waste private dollars on helping another private company (Microsoft) fix stuff. There's no business case for it.
With private companies I can do something about it - I can buy a competitor's product.
Well, no. Up until recently when IE6 was the ost common browser if you wanted to support users, you had to support IE6. You could, of course buy Opera, but that wouldn't help all the users connecting with IE6.
Windows is most infected largely because it is the most popular and therefor the most targeted. But the propagation of those viruses is on the internet.
Erm, no. The majority of infrastructure runs other things. Mostly Linux actually. The ifrastructure is actually a much more valuable target, since it is much better connected. But Windows is the easiest target. And again, the internet doesn't propagate viruses. It sends data. Windows machines propagate viruses. You may note that Microsoft systems were perfectly capable of spreading viruses over LANs where every component was developed by a private company.
Why are you trying so hard to balme the government for the screw-ups of a provate company?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
why did not private companies create such a secure and accountable internet?
There WERE commercial publicly accessible networks before the internet but afaict they mostly failed to gain significant traction because every company running such systems wanted to lock in users and nickle and dime them.
While afaict the Internet was built by researchers who cared about interoperability and getting the data through rather than lockin and billing. Eventually when commercial ISPs got involved they had to come up with a billing model but afaict it has generally been a fairly simplistic one along the lines of "pay X per minuite connected" or "pay X per unit of data, we don't really care where it's going" or "pay X for a connection of speed Y".
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
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.