“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
Love the right-wing lunatics of America – good thing for America really, where else would they go?
I’m trying to find Mac *news* in this article. The Xerox Parc – Apple tie-in is not news.
This article is a falsified pile of shit. The cognitive dissonance being created by the peoples’ anti-governent propaganda machine is dangerous. Who funded xerox parc? This was all government funded research.
President Obama did not say that government created Internet, he said “government research” did.
Gordon Crovitz and the Wall Street Journal are trying to make political hay out of this copy.
L.A.
Mr. Taylor is indulging in a bit of revisionist history.
It WAS FROM THE OUTSET an interconnect between multiple networks. The first day it was turned on it was between four separate universities. I was at one of those universities!
Additionally, to say that it had nothing to do with the cold ware is again revisionist. We were told at every meeting that the underlying purpose of this new network of networks was an experiment to come up with an implementation that would survive a Soviet attack. We were told this was funded by a DoD agency just for this purpose. So either everyone in the U.S. Government involved with the project at the time was lying to everyone else OR Mr. Taylor is changing his story now.
You decide: 100+ people were lying to every one involved back then or Mr. Taylor is revising his story now.
It is revisionist. I wasn’t at one of those universities but as a computer salesperson in 1980 I learned that Darpanet morphed into Arpanet and the intent was to create a survivable network. When it became Arpanet it was to allow schools to communicate to share research.
Apple paid Xerox 4 million dollars to use some of their ideas, not 1 million.
I believe we can all agree that Bush set the bar very low. Unfortunately Obama cannot clear the bar. So in consecutive terms we have had the two worst Presidents in close to a hundred years even including Jimmy Carter.
Vote in Romney and you’ll make it three!!
Where did all the decent politicians go?
PC Magazine has a great rebuttal to this conservative pro-private-sector drivel spouted by the WSJ.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2407539,00.asp
So does _Ars Technica_:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/07/wsj-mangles-history-to-argue-government-didnt-launch-the-internet/
This is a poorly written article, roundly and factually refuted by several sources. I’m disappointed Mac Daily News chose to republish it.
Very disappointed that MDN published this rubbish..I didn’t realize this was a right wing blog? Fortune has a very good article shooting down L. Gordon Crovitz and the Wall Street Journal for so many factual errors its ridiculous!
3.5 year bad trip … O, what a Bummer.
Article in Scientific America (that political rag) that better explains what happened.
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2012/07/23/yes-government-researchers-really-did-invent-the-internet/
Actually, yes it did. This article has been debunked by Scientific American, and the author’s own sources:
“But perhaps the most damning rebuttal comes from Michael Hiltzik, the author “Dealers of Lightning,” a history of Xerox PARC that Crovitz uses as his main source for material. “While I’m gratified in a sense that he cites my book,” writes Hiltzik, “it’s my duty to point out that he’s wrong. My book bolsters, not contradicts, the argument that the Internet had its roots in the ARPANet, a government project.”
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2012/07/23/yes-government-researchers-really-did-invent-the-internet/
Republican facts, ie, lies.
http://mediamatters.org/blog/2012/07/23/wsjs-crovitz-creating-the-internet-and-getting/187284
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57479781-93/no-credit-for-uncle-sam-in-creating-net-vint-cerf-disagrees/
Vint Cerf was there, watching it all develop. He says quite plainly that the U.S Government started the project.
I’m late to the party, But I want to ask MDN why were they willing to lose geek cred by asserting what we all know to be false?
The only defense of this garbage are the posts talking about how much they don’t like Obama. Pretty telling.
It didn’t take long for reality to seep in. and the truth be told.
Damn, MDN boys, are you so hateful of our President that you are willing to drop your own credibility as tech people to try & spew a lie that we all know is partisan crap???
You leach off of other writer’s work, and you have no integrity beyond your alliance to a political ideology that requires you to re-write recent history. Great Job.
Reblogged this on Tech Doozy Blog and commented:
Sometimes the ignorance of those in powerful positions can be amusing.