

No Credit for Uncle Sam in creating Net? Vint Cerf disagrees - smd4
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57479781-93/no-credit-for-uncle-sam-in-creating-net-vint-cerf-disagrees/

======
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.

~~~
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.

~~~
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...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Past_Tense_\(Star_Trek:_Deep_Space_Nine\))
). 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).

------
rondon1
The republicans want to frame the presidential race as Big government vs.
small government. "Romney wants to let the free market fuel America's success
while Obama wants the government to your money and spend it how they see fit"
Obama has recently tried to point out that the success of the free market in
America has been dependent on the US Government. "Someone built the road and
bridges and someone educated your employees, and someone built they internet
that you use. Those things were funded by tax dollars." In this editorial this
guy is hoping to convince people that the government was not responsible for
setting the foundation of the internet.

~~~
twoodfin
_"Someone built the road and bridges and someone educated your employees, and
someone built they internet that you use. Those things were funded by tax
dollars."_

All of that's true, but it's also true that the guy who didn't build a
business also gets to use those roads and the internet. It's also true that
private spending on telecommunications infrastructure in this country utterly
dwarfs public spending. And nobody serious is arguing we shouldn't have roads
and bridges.

How any of this is a justification for $1T deficits and real marginal tax
rates that will approach 50+% is anyone's guess.

It also sounded really bad coming out of the President's mouth. "I’m always
struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart.
There are a lot of smart people out there. . It must be because I worked
harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something -- there are a whole
bunch of hardworking people out there." Hey, maybe being "so smart" and
"working harder than everyone else" doesn't guarantee success, but at least
most voters think those are pretty helpful in America, and may not appreciate
anyone, least of all the President, sneering at them.

~~~
joezydeco
It sounded bad coming out of the President's mouth because he did a very bad
job of paraphrasing Elizabeth Warren. Warren put it like this:

" _I love small businesses. My daughter started a small business, my brother
started a small business, my aunt Alice started a small business, I worked in
it when I was a teenager. This is really about a basic question of fairness.
And that is, when big businesses really make it big, should they get the
special tax breaks so that they don't have to make the contributions to help
support all of the basic infrastructure—you know, the roads and bridges and
the schools and all those pieces, the basic infrastructure that lets the next
kid make it big, and the next kid after that, and the next kid after that? You
know, the way I see this, this is really about the basic question of how we
build our future. The Republicans have given their vision of how we build our
future—they've said, 'I got mine, the rest of you are on your own'. Our vision
of how you build a future is that you make the investments forward, so every
kid has a chance. That's what this is really about._ "

~~~
Prophasi
_The Republicans have given their vision of how we build our future—they've
said, 'I got mine, the rest of you are on your own'._

Which is, in turn, a poor job of paraphrasing the actual small-government
view, which would be better stated as 'I was on my own, I made it, and you can
do the same.'

And not all Republicans/libertarians _have_ made it yet. For them it might be
'I haven't made it yet, but I will -- and so can you.'

Her line implies that the view is an asymmetric "benefits for me, but not for
thee" philosophy, which isn't the case. It'd be great if more ideologues had
enough confidence in their own views to accurately depict and dispute the
opposition's, rather than relying on strawmen.

~~~
joezydeco
I think the GOP's voting record is enough to show that they can publicly
proclaim support for public infrastructure, education, civil rights, and
healthcare but then do exactly the opposite when it comes to legislation.

~~~
Prophasi
Sure. But now you're contrasting the philosophy with what politicians actually
do in office. If your argument is that politicians engage in lying and
hypocrisy, I don't think you'll find many takers.

But I sincerely hope you'd assert the same (with tweaked parameters) for
Democrats.

~~~
joezydeco
No, I believe I was contrasting the GOP's line

'I was on my own, I made it, and you can do the same.'

With the reality:

'I was on my own, I made it _with the assistance of resources that government
provides_ , and you can do the same _if we actually wanted to support that
mode of government in the future, but we don't._ '

~~~
Prophasi
Fair. What resources did the average Republican take advantage of that s/he
now wants to kibosh? Axing roads and bridges is nowhere present in the public
discussion.

Of Warren's cited examples, schools are the only plausible answer. To say that
school is valuable isn't an insight, and to say that school can only be
government-funded and -run is baseless.

An argument can be made that government does it the best, but it's
disingenuous to say that because Republicans (along with everyone else, and
forcibly) had public schooling, they give up their right to upgrade what they
got, for the next generation.

~~~
joezydeco
I don't think anyone's talking about kiboshing at this point, we're at the
earlier stage trying to justify future kiboshing.

Remember that the original discussion here is over whether large government
institutions are beneficial to the public or not in the long run.

What tide of public opinion is changing where the editor of the Wall Street
Journal feels he needs to write an editorial _literally changing the history
of the internet_ to convince people that large institutions were NOT involved
in this information age and subsequent economic boom?

------
nathan_long
The article's focus is on the internet itself, which is the "inter-network" -
the interoperation of individual networks. The first of these networks was
ARPANET, which was developed by contractors by the request and under the
management of ARPA (since renamed DARPA). ARPA proposed ARPANET in 1968. So
the government's pioneering work in networking goes back further than this
article discusses.

There is a complex history here; lots of people built on each other's work,
inside and outside the US government and around the world. But it's silly to
claim the US government gets no credit.

Of course, the government is always full of conflicting opinions. ARPA's
funding of something so speculative and not specifically for military
application had to be finessed and described in military terms to satisfy some
congress members. But ARPA itself was created with the mission of advanced
research after the Russians beat us into space with Sputnik, so computer
networking was really quite well within its mission.

If anyone wants to learn more about this history, I recommend "Inventing the
Internet" and "Where Wizards Stay Up Late." The former is a bit more academic
and technical, but still easy to read, and the latter is a bit more focused on
the people involved.

------
stuff4ben
Key quote: "Cerf: I would happily fertilize my tomatoes with Crovitz'
assertion."

~~~
biot
The claim he's referencing:

    
    
      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.
    

Is Cerf's argument against the notion that it was private concerns that
_created_ the internet on top of a languishing protocol? That's valid, though
it's certainly true that without the private sector investing in developing on
_top_ of the internet that it wouldn't be where it is today.

~~~
gruseom
Government funded the basic R&D; industry commercialized it. Has there been
any real controversy about the history? It doesn't seem so. It's just that
some ideologues don't like some of the facts.

------
newbie12
A little funding for basic computer science research is not big government.
Bailing out banks and giving private solar companies loans is big government.

~~~
HotKFreshSwag
A "little funding", are you serious? DARPA is part of the freaking DoD.

Are you really going to criticize the government for investing in American
companies of which a couple ones failed on a VC news site.

Yeah, companies fail. Yeah, the American government invests in American
companies. Yeah, the American government can afford it. Right now the US
treasury bonds that are indexed to inflation have negative interest rates[1].
Investors are _paying_ Uncle Sam money to take care of their money. The market
is telling the government: invest, invest, invest.

1\. [http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/data-chart-
center/in...](http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/data-chart-
center/interest-rates/pages/textview.aspx?data=realyield)

~~~
astine
"Are you really going to criticize the government for investing in American
companies of which a couple ones failed on a VC news site."

I am. The government is not a VC firm. It's investment are invariably
political and not business based. There's a huge potential for waste there,
not to mention conflict of interest. A DoD project that happened to have
civilian applications is a different beast entirely.

~~~
mrj
The problem can't always be left up to pure market forces, though. VCs do not
fund projects that they don't believe will stand a chance of producing a large
return. They may fund several ideas with a small chance, but a business that
will provide for the greater good, cost a lot of money up front, and only
provide small returns simply won't get funded. Sometimes government must be
used to provide for the greater good or it won't happen at all.

The greater good is often politically based, it's true. It may not be
business-based at all. Fundamentally, a politician can use _any_ issue as a
talking point, and certainly, a politician that funds an idea that creates
something good will use that for their own gain or another's detriment. But
simply because an idea is politically based doesn't mean it is not worth
pursuing, or that the business world would do it any better.

In a way, this is what the government is doing in solar. Solar companies need
to be funded and researched now _before_ the market makes solar (and
alternative energies in general) viable on a large scale. Right now solar is
too expensive to produce and the price of oil gives little incentive to change
habits. For the greater good, companies must be founded and research performed
that will ultimately decimate the entire energy sector of the economy. Few VCs
are going to be interested in destroying value, and yet we must do this before
it is forced on us by the limits of the natural world.

It is not a perfect vehicle but only the government has the pockets and
patience to make that happen. Some will fail. That does not mean we should
never try though. That means all those on the sidelines cheering for
government failure should instead try to assist with better solutions and
better oversight. Most are happier to criticize and make sweeping judgements
though.

~~~
astine
It's not a matter of free markets, it a matter of corruption. Solyndra's
business model as a company was provably unsound years before it emerged as
scandal but it still received funding from the government because people
believed in the idea of a solar company. The thing is that Solyndra ended up
not actually contributing much to solar as a business _or_ technology because
their source of income was based on politics and not on making solar power
workable. Seeing as Solyndra's founders were politically connected, it looks a
lot like the real driving motivator here was political back-rubbing and _not_
actual improvement to alternate energy technology.

If you want the government to fund scientific advancement so that alternate
energies can become reality, that's one thing, but the government shouldn't be
funding provably unsound companies just because they happen to be in a popular
field. It's comparable to investing in Pets Dot Com because the Internet is
the new thing.

At best government funding of industry won't actually improve the industry and
will just be a colossal waste of money. At worse, it will be yet another
avenue for politically connected connected millionaires to get free public
money put into their private ventures.

~~~
mrj
Heh, well, the private sector is immensely corrupt, too. Witness the news from
Wall Street on just about any given day. It's not fair to point to one thing
the government screwed up and say that government is wholly corrupt. It is
imperfect but we're supposed to be working towards a "more perfect union," not
that we had achieved it already.

The great thing about government is we can involve media, we can send FOIA,
and we can scare politicians into doing the right thing if necessary. If
government corruption was as bad as you seem to think, Solyndra would still be
getting paid and none of us would know about it.

~~~
astine
No, no. It's one thing if crooked business men steal from and lie to one
another, it's another entirely if Congress, which is supposed to prevent that
(on at least some level) has an active interest in those lying and cheating
business deals.

The problem isn't that the government is currently actively corrupt (it isn't
for the most part,) it's that the more it get's involved in the economy as
member rather than a governing body, the more motive individual government
members and workers have to be corrupt. We have an active free press and law
enforcement agency which catches corruption but that's not a good reason to
create conflicts of interest where there shouldn't be.

~~~
mrj
Hm, well I see your point. Direct investment in companies is risky for
everybody, governments and individuals.

But what else is there? How is government supposed to create the right
conditions for a market solution? The solution was supposed to be carbon
credits by making using polluting materials gradually more costly over time
and thereby creating the conditions for clean(er) energy to be viable in the
market. But that was rejected outright as a "tax."

Government as a member in the market is bad, we can agree there. But outside
of direct investment, it gets politically difficult to change anything.

------
chris_wot
Wow. Crovitz says that Ethernet was invented to "link different computer
networks". How embarrassing for his argument!

~~~
nathan_long
Yes. I was fascinated to learn recently that, as Cerf says, Ethernet was based
on a broadcast network in Hawaii. Two interesting things about that:

1) Networking between local machines came _after_ larger, more distributed
networks. This seems odd to us who might walk around with 3 computers on our
person, but in those days, you might have 1 computer per institution, and
networking's goal was to allow better sharing of those scarce resources. 2)
The Ethernet method of "broadcasting" every message to everyone on the network
(absent a switch to filter traffic for individual hosts) seemed odd to me when
I first heard it, but there's no other way to do it in a radio network, which
is what Ethernet was based on.

------
nateabele
Here's the thing about this entire debate: who gives a fuck?

Yes, the government, the private sector, and academia (which is funded by both
government and the private sector) all had a hand in developing the
technologies that collectively comprise what we know today as the internet.

But this debate isn't really about the internet. It's about the role of
government and what constitutes a fair tax rate, which are two separate but
related questions.

When Obama talks about roads and bridges, or public education, or the
internet, or whatever, what he's really saying is 'see all this awesome stuff
government has done for you? You really owe us more money.'

That might _not_ be complete and utter bullshit if (a) government actually
spent more than a tiny fraction of its revenue on those things and (b) if it
wasn't an abject failure at everything else.

Instead, the large majority of government spending goes to wars of aggression,
debt service (aka extortion payments to major banks, or embezzlement,
depending on how you look at it), and Social Security. As we know from the
Bush Sr. era, Social Security is completely fucked. Much like the briefcase
full of IOUs at the end of Dumb & Dumber, there isn't a single, actual dime in
the program, because Congress has borrowed against every last one.

Which brings us to the fundamental stupidity of what Obama's suggesting. And,
seriously? We should give these people _more_ money? Fuck _you_ , sir.

------
TheGateKeeper
WSJ should be embarrassed and fire that writer.

Getting basic tenets of history wrong and misleading millions? What a sham.

~~~
lutze
Fire him... Are you serious? Like the truth has ever mattered to Murdoch.

This writer is exactly on message, they'll give him a bonus.

~~~
mseebach
Yes. Polemic columnists is a phenomenon _exclusively_ observed in the Murdoch-
owned end of the world.

~~~
lutze
"BUT EVERYONE ELSE IS DOING IT!!!!" is not an excuse you'd accept from a
child, so why does it become an acceptable defence in politics and journalism?

~~~
mseebach
Good thing that's not what I said, then.

~~~
lutze
Your comment seemed quite sarcastic, and looked to be trying to equivocate
responsibility. Not that I'm above using sarcasm myself, obviously.

The fact is, that in this instance, a Murdoch owned media company is clearly
distorting the truth to further a political agenda. So in this instance, it is
perfectly reasonable to criticise Murdoch in particular, without having to
resort to qualifications.

In my opinion of course.

~~~
mseebach
You implied causation between working for a Murdoch-owned media outlet and
writing a column with a light take on the facts.

That's fallacious, and that's why I called it out.

~~~
lutze
No, I implied causation between working for a Murdoch owned media outlet and
writing a column furthering a specific political agenda.

The lying part is incidental really.

------
defen
This just goes to show that the Republicans are the Stupid Party. They should
be embracing this! The Internet is but one of the many wonderful fruits of the
military-industrial complex. Who was President when the Internet was created?
Nixon/Ford! None of this would have been possible without close collaboration
between the military and private industry, so we should give more public money
to both of them.

------
stox
Personally, I believe that the Internet, as we know it, is a product of the
ARPANET, the BBS communities, the UUCP communities, and the divestiture of
AT&T.

~~~
fpgeek
And two of the four were the result of direct action by the federal
government, so they deserve more than a little credit.

------
russell
And Al Gore invented the internet. Seriously, he sponsored the legislation
that set up and funded the internet as a separate entity from NSFNET and
(D)ARPANET. More government meddling that benefited no-one.

~~~
prodigal_erik
That's merely administrative partitioning, though. On the wire there's one big
reachable address space which predated his involvement, and the creators'
names appear on RFCs.

------
robomartin
From the article:

 _The U.S. government, including ARPA, NSF, DOE, NASA among others absolutely
facilitated, underwrote, and pioneered the development of the Internet. The
private sector engaged around 12 years into the program (about 1984-85) and
was very much involved in powering the spread of the system. But none of this
would have happened without this research support._

I have great faith in the human ability to trench forward and evolve solutions
to problems as well as innovate. This also leads to a belief that if person A
does not invent or discover something then B, or C, or D eventually will
invent or discover that same thing. Proof of this exists across many fields
where nearly simultaneous discoveries or developments happened across the
globe (powered flight?).

It is clear that the interconnected network of computers that ultimately
became the consumer Internet had its roots in a number of government-sponsored
programs.

At the same time, interconnected networks of USERS had already existed for
quite some time. Examples of this were Compuserve and AOL, the myriad of BBS
providers across the world and services like Minitel in France.

It was this existing audience that provided the early adopters that made the
Internet take off as a commercial product. Government couldn't have done that.

More to the point: The US Government couldn't have made the Internet a
commercial success available in every home and every city of the world. It was
entrepreneurial drive across the globe that made this happen. If the US
Government had kept control of it all it would have remained at a level and a
scale not useful to anyone but a few literally well-connected sites.

So, yes, kudos for letting go. Here's a perfect example of government getting
the hell out of the way to see private enterprise take something well beyond
anyone's imagination.

I wish they'd do that with a myriad of other areas that government touches
that would do far better in private hands.

The Internet is a massive example of why government should not be involved in
our activities beyond a very basic level. We can do a far better job.

Getting back to the invention and discovery issue. I have no doubt that the
Internet would have been developed privately if the government had not had any
involvement whatsoever. It would have been different, or not, but the human
drive to innovate and invent coupled with the equally powerful drive to
connect, share and explore would have made it happen. It really isn't too far
of a stretch to see that BBS systems would have sought to create more
efficient and scalable topologies to reach and service more people. And, as
computers and technology evolved this would have pushed the need for speed in
order to provide media services.

