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."
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.
(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.
There's nothing like $HOME
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.
I am officially gone from
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...
Undoing a mod here, but you evidently haven't experienced the woe and misery of the UK rail network, where private companies compete with each other to see who can get away with fleecing the most out of customers, while the network itself falls apart.
No colour or religion ever stopped the bullet from a gun
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.
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).
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
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.
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.
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