“A telling moment in the presidential race came recently when Barack Obama said: ‘If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.’ He justified elevating bureaucrats over entrepreneurs by referring to bridges and roads, adding: ‘The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all companies could make money off the Internet,'” L. Gordon Crovitz writes for The Wall Street Journal. “It’s an urban legend that the government launched the Internet. The myth is that the Pentagon created the Internet to keep its communications lines up even in a nuclear strike. The truth is a more interesting story about how innovation happens—and about how hard it is to build successful technology companies even once the government gets out of the way.”
“The federal government was involved, modestly, via the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency Network. Its goal was not maintaining communications during a nuclear attack, and it didn’t build the Internet,” Crovitz writes. “Robert Taylor, who ran the ARPA program in the 1960s, sent an email to fellow technologists in 2004 setting the record straight: ‘The creation of the Arpanet was not motivated by considerations of war. The Arpanet was not an Internet. An Internet is a connection between two or more computer networks.'”
“If the government didn’t invent the Internet, who did? Vinton Cerf developed the TCP/IP protocol, the Internet’s backbone, and Tim Berners-Lee gets credit for hyperlinks,” Crovitz writes. “But full credit goes to the company where Mr. Taylor worked after leaving ARPA: Xerox. It was at the Xerox PARC labs in Silicon Valley in the 1970s that the Ethernet was developed to link different computer networks.”
“So having created the Internet, why didn’t Xerox become the biggest company in the world? The answer explains the disconnect between a government-led view of business and how innovation actually happens,” Crovitz writes. “Executives at Xerox headquarters in Rochester, N.Y., were focused on selling copiers. From their standpoint, the Ethernet was important only so that people in an office could link computers to share a copier. Then, in 1979, Steve Jobs negotiated an agreement whereby Xerox’s venture-capital division invested $1 million in Apple, with the requirement that Jobs get a full briefing on all the Xerox PARC innovations. ‘They just had no idea what they had,’ Jobs later said, after launching hugely profitable Apple computers using concepts developed by Xerox.”
Crovitz writes, “As for the government’s role, the Internet was fully privatized in 1995, when a remaining piece of the network run by the National Science Foundation was closed — just as the commercial Web began to boom. Blogger Brian Carnell wrote in 1999: ‘The Internet, in fact, reaffirms the basic free market critique of large government. Here for 30 years the government had an immensely useful protocol for transferring information, TCP/IP, but it languished… In less than a decade, private concerns have taken that protocol and created one of the most important technological revolutions of the millennia.'”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews readers too numerous to mention individually for the heads up.]
Related article:
Mitt Romney: Does President Obama think Steve Jobs didn’t build Apple? – July 18, 2012
When did this become a political blog/newsfeed? Whichever side you are on you tick off the other side. In this case, that would be me as the quote was entirely out of context, his point was that without government funded schools, research, highways, etc. no business would exist. Plus there are several political blogs with clips of Romney saying the same thing. Unless you are prepared to lose half your viewers, knock it off and stick to Mac related news.
You are wrong. Schools existed long before the government funded them. Research existed long before government funded it.
Romney was referring to athletes going to the Olympics. That’s different and he was correct.
Which period in our history is the one that you want to go back to?
The LA Times response cleans up the mess that the WSJ made. Boy the Journal’s rep sure has been tarnished by crappy output. In the beginning computers didn’t talk to other computers (at least ours at Duke didn’t). In the early-to-mid 80s we started connecting serial lines between them (at 9600 bps). We had a couple of lines to computers at UNC, I believe at 2400 bps. We used a protocol called UUCP (Unix-to-Unix CoPy). We could exchange email and files. Soon we had Ethernet (1 mbps) and then workstations on Ethernet (10 Mbps, though I think there was a 2 Mbps version in there too). The connection to UNC switched to TCP/IP. This was an internet, an connection between networks. By 1989 we were plugged into the point of presence for the Internet, but it was still mostly universities and research labs. Bill Joy of Sun gave a talk laying out how we were going to go from 1 MIPS workstations to 100 MIPS in a handful of years. Great fun. (man, I sound old!-)
Thanks for the reality check Nat.
The government funded AND created Defense ArpaNet the precursor to the internet. And funded the start of the internet too.
Is it the right-wing that is trying to hide this fact.
The simple fact is that w/out government funding there would be very little pure research being done nowadays. The days of Bell Labs are over
I can’t beleave, that intelligent US people can’t understand, what Obama said: What ever you do as a private man, how ever you are successful with it, you are dependent on the help of others: your businesspartners e.g. and yes, also on what the gov did or does 4 u. If you are not able to understand this, you will end up like greece: they also thought, that their gov is their enemy, that want’s to rob them with taxes and roulings. So they do not pay taxes, do not respect laws, the corruption is systematic and what are they now? Yes, the gov and the greek state is bancrupt!
Not possible in the states?? You just have to elect Romney, he will fav his rich friends and let bleed the rest, till US state will be bancrupt too. You do not believe this? God bless your illusions!
Good points, guy, but beware: labeling yourself Swiss endangers you as a flash point, representing a schizo nation that hosts peace conferences but has four official languages, maintained a calculated neutrality during World War II, and is still regarded as the preeminent money-launderer of crime lords, war criminals, and bankers.
Just sayin’. Nobody’s safe from demonization. Not long ago, I read right here a diatribe against Mother Theresa.
Ok, I suppose that MDN is one less Mac-centric site I will be visiting. Clearly, no one at MDN took the time to find out who D.A.R.P.A. is, and more importantly, was….
http://www.darpa.mil/about/history/history.aspx
Spoiler: Yes, the Internet was started by the U.S. Govt. as a military communications medium. No, you didn’t know that when you posted is swill.
Do not desert us. We can learn from you.
Oh, it was from the WSJ *EDITORIAL PAGE* — should have said so at the outset. That sickly space of an otherwise fine paper is something to be avoided, just like a peed-in phone booth.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET
This is the best political fanatics have?
Lame.
I ain’t descended from no monkey!!!
That may well be. But you sure look like a monkey. And you smell like one, too.
I ain’t descended from no monkey!!
Monkey face.
1. who cares who invented it.
2 . what the hell does this have to do with apple? nothing. mdn is just putting these articles on for traffic or cause they are republicians. whatever but its time to switch to apple insider for apple news.
Stay with us, m, otherwise the terrorists win.
Let’s move on to a more relevant topic for this blog, like whose religion is the One True Religion. Or if there is a True Religion. Etc., etc. That’s quite likely to be an equally fruitful discussion and couldn’t be any less boring than this one. The golden rule of civilized discourse — stay away from discussions of politics and religion. And which OS or mobile platform is best.
Most relevant comment of all!
Religion, political affiliation, economic theory, sports team, favorite colour—that’s why millions of people come to MDN and lustily rub their hands together in anticipation of combat. Boring? Perhaps for those whose lives are already fulfilled, but vital lifeblood for many of us who are still searching for the faintest trace of acceptance for our pathetic ideas and mindless political allegiances.
I guess nothing ever came from a little government program call NASA, either.
You smug, right-wing fuckers make me sick. Who’s on your side? Colorado mad-man shooter, Michelle Hitler Bachman, Rush Racist Limbaugh, Fox fuckass news.
Mitt Romney is an asswipe – brings his own “darkies” to an NAACP rally. Money money money is all that you worship, on top of the high handed hypocrisy of christianity
You conservatives can all go to hell.
If this is Apple’s base, go Microsoft!
Yeah! Now that’s what I’m talking about! I’m on my way now to volunteer for the North Korean Army.
And if they reject me because I’m not slanty-eyed enough, Iran should accept my services.
And if they decide I lack the requisite anti-semitism, there’s always Microsoft, a bastion of ethics and morality.
Just don’t ask me to work for Google.
Well, for $30K+ you can have dinner with him and correct him…..
Everyone is politics is a failure. I don’t get why we keep electing the same idiots back into office. People like Pelosi, Mccain……ugh.
In the sense that, without consumers, even a great business and its leaders will fail, Obama is correct. By extension, a government without taxpayers cannot survive. You can raise taxes on the ones who are paying taxes but without getting more people working and contributing, you won’t succeed. And even if you took all of the 1%’s wealth, they won’t long contribute without consumers on their end (or fast enough to put a dent in the deficit and government spending). For that reason, it would be in Mr. Obama’s best interest as president and leader of this country, the citizens of the country, those we owe debts to and our posterity to get more people working (and spending) as quickly as we can. That is a fundamental truth. Most other things should be secondary.
Wow The Wall Street Journal has become garbage since Rupert Murdoch bought that papered and filled with idiots.
Let’s get it straight MDN! This site is becoming garbage too. Which doesn’t create anything, yet profits from other’s work.
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2012/07/23/yes-government-researchers-really-did-invent-the-internet/
Good job posting links, this makes MDN relevant and useful
Actually the political discourse on this site has improved dramatically from what i remember. It used to be full of idiots who couldn’t put a coherent thought together and would just call people lemmings and commies.
That was a good read.
Obama really believes that the country is running on Government alone, it seems. But many, including myself would disagree. We are all interdependent. We can not live without each other. Businesses, government, and consumers all make the money circulate. Businesses give money to consumers through salaries. The consumers then pay part of that salary to the government which allow them to continue moving. The government then gives that money back to businesses though projects like road building. And the cycle goes on. It even has more trends than I mentioned.
My point is, Obama is right by saying that te government is very involved. But he is wrong when he says the government alone is the credit. We work as one, we function as one. If one deteriorates, the rest would be affected.
The creation of the internet, as this article points ot, is a great example of the interdependence between us. Businesses (Xeson and others), the government, and later the consumer, are all involved in making it a success. The government and businesses were the creators. And if you did not have any consumers to buy your products online, you would not e a successful business.
We are in this together, no single entity is of greater importance than the others.
The entire article was based on a misinterpretation of Obama’s speech, but you wouldn’t know that from the article. Obama never said government alone deserves credit for creating the internet. And the people who repeat this lie are liars themselves. I’m calling you, Steve, a liar.
President Obama also said that you have mentors, a great teacher, someone who gave you a hand up,,,,,
Please read the whole speech before acting the expert.
And back on topic, the internet from wiki
Please. I was there, and this article is baloney. (1) Vint didn’t “invent” TCP/IP all by himself, as he’ll be the first to acknowledge. The specifics of the protocol, including the vital end-to-end principle, were largely worked out by Dave Clark and Dave Reed at MIT, who were supported by — ahem — ARPA. (2) Ethernet wasn’t a way to bridge computer networks; it was a way to connect devices on a local area network, and remains the primary way that that is done today. (3) The ARPA and PARC communities were very close in the seventies, and Alan Kay discusses them as a single joint community. The personal computer was conceived by Alan when he was an (ARPA-supported) student of Dave Evans at Utah, and then he moved to PARC where he and others brought that vision to life. (4) As for TCP/IP, it took off not because it was brilliant; there were lots of network stacks around at the time. It took off because there was a great, free implementation on the free, DARPA-paid-for, Berkeley Unix operating system. Berkeley Unix was built by Bill Joy and Sam Leffler at Berkeley, supported by DARPA. It got distributed for free, and was adapted by Sun, HP (HP/UX), DEC (Ultrix), IBM (AIX); gave rise to (DARPA-funded) Mach at CMU, which became NextStep, which we now know as OS/X. As for the web, it grew out of a bunch of previously-existing, academic-developed, DARPA-sponsored services: ftp (developed by a bunch of ARPA-supported researchers in 1972), WAIS (Brewster Kahle, then at Thinking Machines, which was a commercialization of the DARPA Connection Machine project). Berners-Lee unified these services on a plaintext terminal using hyperlinks; it became the web we know when Marc Andreesen at UIUC and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (Department of Energy) added photos and made it Mosaic. And that’s just off the top of my head; I haven’t mentioned Jon Postel, who organized the Domain Name System and really finalized the architecture of the Internet we know today (Jon was at USC/ISI, DARPA-supported); Eric Allman, who invented the email systems we use today (DARPA-supported, UC-Berkeley); RISC architecture (John Hennessy, Stanford; Dave Patterson and Randy Katz, Berkeley; DARPA-supported); RAID storage systems (Randy Katz, again); I could go on. The fact is that industry would never have developed the Internet, because there was no clear business model for the Internet. That came much, much later — long after DARPA had invested many years and much taxpayer money in finalizing the technology.
Crovitz writes, “As for the government’s role, the Internet was fully privatized in 1995, when a remaining piece of the network run by the National Science Foundation was closed — just as the commercial Web began to boom. Blogger Brian Carnell wrote in 1999: ‘The Internet, in fact, reaffirms the basic free market critique of large government. Here for 30 years the government had an immensely useful protocol for transferring information, TCP/IP, but it languished… In less than a decade, private concerns have taken that protocol and created one of the most important technological revolutions of the millennia.’”
This is pretty clueless. He’s saying that if government let private firms support the Internet from 1995 it would have grown much faster. On what? How many computers existed in the 60s and how many of those were not in the hands of the military or universities or labs working for the military?
I’m very sad to see MDN starting to go down Freeper territory. I thought this site was about Macs?
Only the intellectually devastated missed the very softball point-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_on_the_shoulders_of_giants
this is fukn SNORE personified. Since there are two very whiney camps of americans insisting politics are like some odd sporting event.. i’m going to have to say the right wingers look dumber for making a big issue out of his quote.
but hey- any quote based in science tends to rile up the fairy tale crowd. so no big shocker.
Xerox DID NOT invent the Internet you mental midgets. Do your homework. Actually research the facts. Get real data. Clue : Rupert Murdoch was NOT INVOLVED.
Hey MDN- needed some hits?
The best part of this bull crap blog is the fact he censored comments thr damage Gus frail feeble indeed ideology. Hypocrite hahaha.
You, MDN… Are a fucking loser. Gaga.. You know it deep down and that’s all there is to it. He’s the Perez Hilton of apple bloggers at this point.
Obviously military spending research creates many things that will end up in the commercial sector. But to somehow justify that entrepreneurs depend on government to succeed is idiotic.
Anyone who listens to the speech can clearly see that the “that” referred to means the infrastructure built by society which allows a business to thrive. It’s not referring to the business itself.
Have we so fallen victim to the soundbite that a single sentence is all anyone can pay attention to now?
I’d like to interrupt this hotly debated political ping-pong match to thank Steve Jobs, once again, for bringing the Macintosh to market, and thereby ushering in yet another wave of great tech innovation (ALL Macs have been ‘networkable’ since day one). You may now return to your regularly scheduled political slugfest.