When the Federal Communications Commission approved net neutrality, one of my conservative friends tweeted, “Apparently the private sector will now have to invent something to replace the internet.” The private sector, though, didn’t invent the internet. The government did. Giant telecom companies now want to take it over and profit from it at the expense of the rest of us.
The internet was created by academic researchers at public universities who wanted to collaborate, not compete. They needed to share data quickly among several laboratories and devised a way to do it over telephone lines beginning in the late 1960s. Virtually every innovation to the system during the next 20 years came from government funding, not the private sector.
Now, the service providers like Time-Warner, Verizon and Comcast want to take it over. People go to the internet for the content, not the providers. What better way to kill the creativity of the web than to let the telecom giants determine what we can and cannot see? Fortunately, the FCC stuck with the masses instead of the gazillionaires.
Still, can you imagine the Republicans today supporting the development of a network that allowed a bunch of intellectual eggheads to communicate faster? They would be ridiculing it as an example of academia wasting precious tax dollars. The free-marketeers that make up today’s GOP would have killed it off because it doesn’t fit nicely into their ideological box that says only competition and the private sector create anything worth having.
The government and academia have a long history of working together to create things the private sector can’t or won’t. They built the space program, providing us with everything from cordless drills to solar panels to memory foam. In North Carolina, they created the Research Triangle Park, building one of the most powerful economic engines in the country.
However, if you live in rural North Carolina, you’ve seen what happens when the unregulated free market has it’s way. Remember the furniture industry? Killed by the free market. The textile industry? Decimated when the government decided to let free trade reign. Twenty years after NAFTA and we still haven’t recovered.
The internet, the space program and the Research Triangle Park were all built when pragmatists from both parties ran the state and nation. They understood that government and the free market each have their places and both contribute to the betterment of our society and economy. Today, the GOP has been taken over by ideologues who demonize government while worshipping at the altar of the free market. No telling what we’re missing out on now.
Thomas Mills is the founder and publisher of PoliticsNC.com. Before beginning PoliticsNC, Thomas spent twenty years as a political and public affairs consultant. Learn more >
Jean Paul: Everything you say, to the best of my understanding, is true, but you are arguing against your own position.
DARPA was a government-funded program, and it did indeed develop ARPANET. Government decision-making and actions privatized it, leading to the internet. So, no matter how one slices it, government-sponsored research was the origin of the internet.
And, to be truly accurate, neither government nor the free market should be given credit for the internet. Rather, it was cutting-edge, basic research, conducted by faculty at major US universities, and funded to large degree by DARPA and NSF, that led to the internet.
Government didn’t invent “the internet”, the U.S. military, funded by DARPA, created ARPANET, and the most certainly did innovate the protocol suite TCP/IP. ARPANET began as network of 4 computers, and a few years later, email and instant messaging appeared, but only for 37 computers. The likely reason that it was government researchers who first developed a packet switching network using the protocol TCP/IP before the private sector did has a lot to do with the Communications Act of 1935, the FCC, the subsequent freezes that placed regulatory barriers to entry.
The “internet” as we know it today didn’t happen until government fully privatized the network using the protocol suite TCP/IP, and it was then, never before then, when “the internet”, the “super information highway”, the “world wide web” arose, through spontaneous ordering process between millions of users these interactions are the internet, and not ARPANET. Further, it was only after the government limited the ban on commercial use that the internet really began to flourish, and when people speak of “the internet” this is what they referring to, not a limited defense network designed for communications in the event of nuclear war, even with its emails and instant messaging, that ain’t the internet, baby.
I owned a small IT company in the 80’s. I well remember the fight Al Gore had when he wanted to open the DARPANET to commercial users. He succeeded, or we would not have the internet we have today. But the system has yet to achieve the capacity of the “information superhighway” Gore envisioned, with a nationwide fiber optic system.
I worked in Washington in the 1970s. One day a Republican member of the NC delegation said “you know that young Gore has been holding all these seminars about wild ideas and about the future. Does your congressman ever go? Just “way out” stuff including something called the internet which is supposed to be the new gift from God.”
Lyndon: Again, all true. But to the arch-conservatives now in power in Congress and in the majority of the states, the federal government is viewed as an opponent, and definitely not a collaborative and cooperative partner (a good example? Many states, like NC, failing to expand Medicaid despite the free/tiny state fiscal contribution and health benefits to millions). And, to those conservatives, long-term governmental vision, planning, and investment are thought to be an unworthy course of action.
Many people operate within that frame of thinking, I agree. We have to engage this debate and change the frame. No business in this country could turn a profit absent government investment and government regulation. How could trucking companies operate otherwise? What foreign nation would buy our agricultural products with assurance of adequate safety inspection? How could large scale air travel happen absent government regulation and oversight? There would be few home mortgages absent government managed mortgage insurance programs. These points have to be made repeatedly if the frame is to change.
The Inter-Coastal Waterway, The Eisenhower Interstate Highway System, food and drug safety inspection, every major airport in this country, every major port and every navigable waterway in this country, Yellowstone National Park, The outer banks parks and seashores, The Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Every state university. The technology spin-offs of the Apollo and other NASA programs. And all the well being, revenue and pride they produce are the products of the elective and collective will of the people of this nation and this state.Every aspect of our economy and every business that operates within it flourish because of government investment and long-term planning that is increasingly absent from profit-only corporate culture.
Well said Thomas, well said…now waiting for the Al Gore comments in Three, Two, One….
All true. I’ll only add that it was federal government grants to university researchers via NSF and DOD (DARPA) that played a huge role in the Internet’s birth and early development.