Rebuttal: The importance of TCP/IP is overblown. There are many competing protocols (e.g. UDP), any one of which could have been the “backbone” of the Internet, instead. Basically, a protocol just specifies the details of disassembling the transmission into packets and gives the header format for each packet. Big freakin’ deal. If government invented the Internet, then, by the same token, government murdered the man who made the invention of the Internet possible, Alan Turing.
Clayton -
But did the government inventing the internet cause Alan Turing to be murdered? Or vice versa?
The point is that if you’re going to apply causality that loosely, then the government is responsible for a great deal of nefarious goings on, far more than can be redeemed by the work of a couple guys in defining one out of many available packet transport protocols who happened to be on government payroll and which happened to emerge as the dominant protocol, despite its many flaws. TCP/IP is nothing to wax poetic over… it’s really the QWERTY of internetwork protocols.
Clayton -
I don’t think its really even that important a question whether or not the internet would have been created sooner in a free-market situation. If we could know the truth, and the truth turned out to be that the internet would have first come about through the government instead of from a free-market, would this necessarily be points for the government or strikes against the market? I don’t think it would be.
To say the government invented the internet is already a dubious claim, and somewhat a matter of semantics. What the government really did was compile many different, highly important technological advances made by the market and use them in unison to form the internet. But, for the sake of argument, lets just say that their compellation of these technologies constitutes “invention”. At the time of its invention, it was used for military purposes. It would have had virtually no use in the market of the time. We can certainly credit the government with inventing the tank first (I would guess), yet this is no strike against the market.
Of course the internet and a tank are very different things. My point in saying that is for the market to have invented the internet when the internet was invented might have been a wasteful use of resources. The government doesn’t always invent eternally worthless shit, its just that when the shit they invent aint eternally worthless, its probably worthless today, or will be worthless very soon. So internet = good idea. Internet back then may have equaled good idea with no practical market purpose.
I could be wrong about this as I have very limited knowledge in this field. Perhaps there was some great usage. I just wanted to make the point that the first entrant into a market is not always points for the entrant.