[cs702]

Why would anyone try to revise history, casting doubt on the verifiable fact that the U.S. government deserves credit for funding and helping create the Internet? Why would the Wall Street Journal publish this garbage?

Short, simplistic answer: because the mere existence of this article, published in a newspaper widely perceived as reputable, is "evidence" of debate about the government's role for all those politicians, ideologues, and other interests who want to cut government spending.

[SkyMarshal]

>Why would the Wall Street Journal publish this garbage?

It's part of the campaign to undermine Net Neutrality, 'deregulate' the Internet, and turn it over to the telecoms to run as they see fit.

If the Conservatives can convince the public that the private sector and unregulated free markets, not government, are responsible for creating the Internet as it now - a truly level platform where all comers have equal access to audiences and bandwidth (services like Akamai excepted) - then it's easy to make the case that Net Neutrality, common carrier, and all that stuff is just more government regulation that impedes progress and economic growth, or worse control what people do on the Internet.

Looks like a new front in the battle for the Internet.

[rayiner]

Because a large contingent of Americans have taken a particular ideological simplification of one 1970's economics movement and turned it into a religion, rooted in faith, with the "invisible man... err hand" as its God.

[tjic]

> verifiable fact that the U.S. government deserves credit for funding and helping create the Internet?

Because it's NOT verifiable.

Some of us believe in historical determinism. Moore's Law meant that chips were getting better and cheaper. Telecommunications was growing. People were already using modems to build ad-hoc networks.

I argue that there was going to be an internet in the year 2000 whether or not the US government pushed a piddly amount of funding into Arpanet or not.

This is distinct from my take on rocket technology: I think that the market would NOT have perceived human spaceflight as worth doing, and if the US and Soviet governments had not pushed it, there might not yet be a person in orbit.

Reasonable people can differ on whether the US government "caused" the internet or merely jumped in front of a parade and then later declared itself the leader.

...but your opinion that one of these is "verifiable" is nonsense.

[_delirium]

That's a completely different argument, though an interesting one to have. The WSJ editorial was not arguing that hypothetically the private sector could have created the internet, even though in actual fact it didn't. That's at least a plausible claim. But the WSJ instead argued, incorrectly, that the private sector did create the internet, without significant government involvement. The main justification seems to be a claim that Ethernet is an internetworking technology and was created by Xerox, and that ARPANET shouldn't be considered significant to this history. The article is very confused, and more or less just wrong, not making any sort of interesting point about historical contingency.

[knowtheory]

What the WSJ is trying to do here, and what you're doing by carrying their water is incredibly insidious.

You can claim that there would have been a global communications infrastructure anyway, but that ignores the vitally important question of what assumptions that network would rely upon, and who would push its growth, and to what (or whose) ends.

There's a Deep Space Nine episode which touches on an alternative to the universe we live in where global communications terminals in 2024 are locked down and require a license to publish to (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Past_Tense_(Star_Trek:_Deep_Spa... ). What stopped that from being our internet, instead of the internet we have now?

I certainly do not take for granted the government's role in shaping what our network looks like.

[tjic]

> what you're doing by carrying their water is incredibly insidious.

You lost points for assuming the worst possible motivation of my actions.

"Carry their water"? Meaning "To do someone's bidding; to serve someone's interests."

PLEASE!

First, this is tremendously insulting; it's not saying "you're wrong", but "I distrust you so much as a human being that I don't even trust that the words coming out of your mouth are your own - I ASSUME that you're on someone else's payroll".

Second, if you project this sort of thing on anyone who disagrees with you, you're committing a harm against yourself - you're assuming that you're on the force of good and light and those who disagree with your are not just wrong but are EVIL.

How likely are you to EVER correct an erroneous opinion of yours if you assume that everyone who disagrees with you is evil?

I've changed my opinions on tons of things (to ones that I think are more correct than my old ones), and a central tool to do that is not immediately assuming that the other side is made up of liars and stooges.

I've got an actual opinion, based on actual reading.

It happens to agree with something the WSJ says.

Go jump in a pond.

[knowtheory]

I was concerned that you might misconstrue my post, and for that I am sorry, I should have made my point clearer.

I am not making aspersions about your motives. I am perfectly willing to believe that you are sincere.

I might even be convinced that the author of the WSJ opinion piece is sincere (I at least lean towards the likelihood that he's probably using evidence like the proverbial drunk uses lampposts, i.e. for support rather than illumination). That does not change the insidiousness of his piece, or your defense of his piece.

I have serious problems with revisionism (the WSJ piece) or efforts to downplay its seriousness (your post).

[mfringel]

Let's say that the assertion "An Internet would have existed in 2000 anyway, even if the government did nothing." is true. It's unverifiable, but let's assert it.

Even if it was true, _that's not what happened._ FedGov put money into Arpanet, which led to multiple academic (and a handful of corporate research) institutions putting time, money and organizational effort into creating the current framework. That much is known.

It theoretically could have happened some other way in some alternate timeline, but in this one it happened like that, and pointing out the possibility of an alternate history doesn't change the one we have.

[brown9-2]

This is a funny definition of "verifiable" that the commenter you are replying to is not using.

I argue that there was going to be an internet in the year 2000 whether or not the US government pushed a piddly amount of funding into Arpanet or not.

This is a bit like saying that the USA should not be credited as the first nation to develop and use a nuclear weapon because Nazi Germany would have done the same thing if it had survived long enough.

[yardie]

How is this not verifiable? The US government still has the receipts for the equipment they ordered and paid for through Arpanet. Most of the companies (BBN, Level 3) went on to be the very first companies on the internet.

And determinism is like religion, you really have to suspend belief to say this was going to happen because __??__.

[ghurlman]

So it probably would have happened anyway, therefore what did happen didn't happen?

[tjic]

Correlation is not causality.

If it rains this afternoon, and you later tell me that you did a rain dance outside ten minutes before hand, why should I assume that you caused the rain?

[Jtsummers]

I don't see the connection between this, and your assertion that the internet would've happened by now anyways.

The US government funded (or provided funding for) many of the early developments that made the internet as we know it possible. As others have pointed out, the government also made it possible for the telcos to lay the infrastructure by providing them access to public lands and private lands (easements and eminent domain).

How would the companies have assembled the capital to acquire that land or land access themselves at that time? Keep in mind, unlike the Google Fiber announcement, the thing they were building had no demonstrated value as it does today.

In your painful analogy, you suggest that the spending and research and construction the government did or enabled was akin to tossing coins into a wishing well, and magically the internet came into existence. How does that fit with the facts that we have? Or do you also deny that anything in history is knowable?

[imgabe]

Maybe they would have created a global network. Probably it would be wholly owned by AT&T and we'd all be paying $3.99 a minute to access it though.

[T-hawk]

> I argue that there was going to be an internet in the year 2000 whether or not the US government pushed a piddly amount of funding into Arpanet or not.

Indeed. How about Fidonet? Fidonet developed as a network of interconnected BBSes, starting from 1984 and widely accessible by about 1994, without government stimulus. Fidonet had a backbone and a hierarchical structure for routing messages. It's not hard to envision a world where telecommunications companies got into that business, providing dedicated high-speed connections and lines for Fidonet (becoming an FSP rather than ISP), so that it evolved from an asynchronous modem-based network into real-time connectivity. So what we call a website could have developed from the BBS rather than from gopher servers, and what we call a browser could have evolved from Telix rather than Mosaic.

There are many alternative ways a global network could and would have developed without US government initiation. But it's also possible that the US government stimulus made it happen sooner and more centralized to the US (some of Fidonet's development came from Russia.)

[cube13]

>There are many alternative ways a global network could and would have developed without US government initiation. But it's also possible that the US government stimulus made it happen sooner and more centralized to the US (some of Fidonet's development came from Russia.)

But none of those became what we use today. That's the key point here. You can argue that it would have happened anyway, or that some other network protocol or technology was superior and should have been used instead of what we use today, but that's not what the article is saying.

The research that was funded by ARPA became the baseline for what would become the Internet. That's what happened.