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.
How is that a counterexample? Those are two examples of the government inventing key parts of the internet! Tim Berners-Lee worked for CERN, and Vinton Cerf worked for DARPA (and during some of the time at UCLA and Stanford... pursuant to DARPA grants).
Plenty of other problems, such as attempting to minimize the role of ARPANet, which is just absurd. I'd nominate the following article as a better starting point, and chalk the WSJ op-ed up to election-year silliness: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet
The rest it total garbage, written by someone who denies facts to promote an agenda. This is what is really sad. I mean, come on, the government (primarily DOD) of course spearheaded ARPANET, NSFNET, etc. which morphed into the internet we know of today. It's indisputable - funding poured into universities, and into private contractors (like BB&N) to work on this. Even Silicon Valley itself, it can be argued, wouldn't be here if it weren't for the government in the early days.
This is not to say that the government is wonderful, or that it is good, or should be larger in our lives, or anything like that - but, a FACT is a FACT. These birthers and creationists and other deniers just make up things to fit their models. To me, that is incredibly dangerous.
And note that the guy who wrote this article has "impressive" credentials - Yale, law school, Rhodes Scholar. But he doesn't have a clue about how modern technology works! (equating Xerox's Ethernet with the "internet", for example). This is pathetic, and pathetic that the "venerated" Wall Street Journal would publish this nonsense.
>the Ethernet was developed to link different computer networks.
Does anyone know what aspect of Ethernet the author might be misinterpreting here?
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."
This seems designed to discredit Obama's claim that the government performs useful functions. The WSJ was acquired by Rupert Murdoch a few years ago (Fox News). Since then, the editorial page has been politicized.
The editorial page has been politicized for a long time; I'm not sure that particular issue can be blamed on Murdoch. In the '80s it was a huge supply-side economics and Reagan cheerleader.
