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.
Slashdot Mirror
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.