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."
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"
Translation: Don't falsify my ideology with facts!
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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
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.
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...
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.
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.
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
He was one of several sponsors of the Senate bill that made the Internet more available to the general public.
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.
Vint Cerf and Bob Khan (who know something about Internet history) had this to say:
"No one in public life has been more intellectually engaged in helping to create the climate for a thriving Internet than the Vice President."
and
"as far back as the 1970s, Congressman Gore promoted the idea of high speed telecommunications as an engine for both economic growth and the improvement of our educational system. He was the first elected official to grasp the potential of computer communications to have a broader impact than just improving the conduct of science and scholarship [...] the Internet, as we know it today, was not deployed until 1983. When the Internet was still in the early stages of its deployment, Congressman Gore provided intellectual leadership by helping create the vision of the potential benefits of high speed computing and communication."
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
He also advocated publicly for it, which went a bit beyond just putting his name on a Senate bill. He really believed in its potential and tried to make others aware of it. He deserves more credit than he gets, in any case.
Check out my world simulator thingy.
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.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
http://web.eecs.umich.edu/~fessler/misc/funny/gore,net.txt
Describing his role as congressman, Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, who played key roles in the development of the Internet and TCP/IP write:
"He was the first elected official to grasp the potential of computer communications to have a broader impact than just improving the conduct of science and scholarship. Though easily forgotten, now, at the time this was an unproven and controversial concept. Our work on the Internet started in 1973 and was based on even earlier work that took place in the mid-late 1960s. But the Internet, as we know it today, was not deployed until 1983. When the Internet was still in the early stages of its deployment, Congressman Gore provided intellectual leadership by helping create the vision of the potential benefits of high speed computing and communication. As an example, he sponsored hearings on how advanced technologies might be put to use in areas like coordinating the response of government agencies to natural disasters and other crises."
They go on to discuss the important contributions he made as Senator and Vice President.
He was one of several sponsors of the Senate bill that made the Internet more available to the general public.
It should be noted that Al Gore Jr.'s father, (Al Gore, Sr. :), was instrumental in getting the interstate highway system build in the US. Once that was established, it was intrumental in allowing shipping (by truck) to become easier.. Before the IS system, you had small roads (like the famous Route 66): it was common to receive Florida oranges as a Christmas gift in NYC because this was a big deal: they had come all the way from Florida! The interstate system helped kickstart commerce because you were no longer dependent on the rail companies: anyone could (for example) start a trucking company, because the barrier to entry was so much lower because of smaller capital costs.
Al Gore Jr. saw this as a child, and thought (correctly it turns out) that the same thing could happen with computer networks. It was no accident that the initial buzzword for the Internet was "information superhighway". The US (and other countries) had had "highways" for many years, but they were two-lane roads basically. The Interstate system was, when they were created, consiered to be a "superhighway". And so it was with the commercialization with the Internet.
I read what I posted. He wrote the High Performance Computing Act, 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.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
No, Al Gore invented mathematics. That's why we have AlGoreithms.
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.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
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.