No Credit for Uncle Sam in creating Net? Vint Cerf disagrees

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57479781-93/no-credit-for-uncle-sam-in-creating-net-vint-cerf-disagrees/

by smd4 • 14 years ago

79 77 14 years ago

news.cnet.com

chris_wot• 14 years ago

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

nathan_long3• 14 years ago

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.

TheGateKeeper• 14 years ago

WSJ should be embarrassed and fire that writer.

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

lutze4• 14 years ago

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.

mseebach3• 14 years ago

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

russell2• 14 years ago

From the WSJ:

"Gordon Crovitz is a media and information industry advisor and executive, including former publisher of The Wall Street Journal, executive vice president of Dow Jones and president of its Consumer Media Group."

Not exactly a random stringer.

stuff4ben• 14 years ago

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

biot• 14 years ago

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.

gruseom2• 14 years ago

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.

mcguire• 14 years ago

Let's see: 1975 (IIRC, TCP was somewhat later, but I'll be generous) plus 30 years would be 2005.

The Boucher Bill was 1992, prior to that commercial traffic was not allowed on the ARPA/NSFNET. Now, I wasn't around for the early Internet, since it wasn't particularly common until the mid '80's, but "languish" is not how I would describe what I saw. At that time, it connected every research and most educational organizations and did almost everything it does now except carry specifically commercial traffic. HTTP was not developed until the early '90's, and there was essentially no private interest in the Internet until HTTP had become prevalent, except for what it was already doing: email, news, and file transfer. And between the introduction of commercial traffic and infrastructural improvements which were part of the dot-com boom, the Internet did those three things significantly less well than it had previously.

So, yes it wouldn't be where it is today without private sector investing (particularly the massive infrastructure build-out in the late '90's). But "languish" for "30 years"? "Private concerns" created "technological revolutions"?

rondon1• 14 years ago

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.

delinka• 14 years ago

Agreed.

I recall someone saying once upon a time (this is a personal anecdote, not something from public history) that it would be in company's best interests to educate employees and therefore we should let the private free market handle education while altogether abolishing public education. I can't comprehend why anyone couldn't see how public education (or at the very least heavily regulated, all-private education) is an ultimate benefit to society.

You think 'government indoctrination' is bad now? How about when these corporations funding the schools start insisting that curricula be modified toward their own agendas? Or perhaps when they decide indentured servitude is the best way to get a 'return on investment' (i.e. we educated you/your kids for the last five years, you owe us five years of employment at reduced wages)?

But that's not actually likely to happen if education were entirely privatized. No, because corporations are focused on returns now and their numbers for this quarter and spending on education cuts into the bottom line and the ROI doesn't happen for two decades. Then, the schools realizing that everyone needs an education and it needs to be funded, start calling for taxes to pay for universal education...

It's a similar problem for pure research. No one knows if pure research will pay off. Ever. Sometimes, it pays off in fifty years. On odd occasions it pays off in less than ten. It seldom pays off in the next twelve months. Someone has to insist on pure research to move technology forward. Or we could all just stay like we are, use up our resources, and go back to living in caves.

twoodfin4• 14 years ago

"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.

joezydeco4• 14 years ago

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."

crusso• 14 years ago

Do people just go through and downvote opinions they disagree with and upvote the ones they do agree with?

brown9-22• 14 years ago

real marginal tax rates that will approach 50+%

Can you elaborate on this? It seems to me that the proposal for restoring the highest bracket's marginal tax rate to what it was prior to 2001 would restore it to 39.6%.

cantankerous• 14 years ago

I agree with you on infrastructure spending except for one nuance. Usually telecom companies laying down infrastructure are given rights of way and easements that make their jobs much, much, less expensive. That is to say, if we lived in a private property, capitalist utopia, laying down thousands of miles of fiber would be orders of magnitude more expensive and possibly completely intractable. Government plays a role here by suspending private property rights in lieu of the added value to the public where infrastructure is concerned. If you were to figure in the money saved to infrastructure builders by government, then the spending numbers would like quite a bit different.

nathan_long3• 14 years ago

Yes. If anything, the internet is a good example of the correct place for government and business. The initial research was publicly funded, and when it was up and running, it was handed off to private companies to manage, who compete to offer the best prices and service. (Of course, we'd all love to have more ISP competition, but that's a different subject.)

joshuahedlund• 14 years ago

As prominent libertarian thinker Julian Sanchez said on Twitter recently, "Look, I'd really love it if it were a myth that gov't created the proto-Internet, but it's just not... A decent working definition of dogmatism is the refusal to recognize that sometimes GENERAL truths have counterexamples." [1][2]

[1] https://twitter.com/normative/status/227822924575408129 [2] https://twitter.com/normative/status/227829635109515265

cloverich2• 14 years ago

While true of Republicans, imo the quoted argument is equally dogmatic. Its not as though its used as a simple painting of Government as symbiotic; today's liberal arguments take it much further. Something like the following: "Government invented the internet. And without government, NO ONE would have invented the internet."

That, imo, is silly. PEOPLE invented the internet. There's time's and places where private investors are better at backing these people, and times when government forces are necessary. These blanket assertions that pumping money into either (without direction) will lead to improved innovation and economy are reductionist and, to a large extent, fundamentalist.

Its not simple. Investment is tough, and both sides get it wrong more often than right (that's the nature of business).

spamizbad• 14 years ago

> today's liberal arguments take it much further. Something like the following: "Government invented the internet. And without government, NO ONE would have invented the internet."

The "free market" versions of the Internet were the walled-gardens of AOL, CompuServe, Prodigy, etc. I'm not sure if you've ever used them, but I did and let me tell you - they all sucked compared to the Internet, even in 1994-95.

jeffdavis• 14 years ago

I find the Republican perspective more convincing:

* Roads, police, schools, and other critical things that businesses need to thrive are mostly provided by state and local governments.

* Those critical things actually cost a pretty small fraction of total government spending.

* The exception to the above point would be the DoD, which could be seen as critical to the success of business, and DARPA which funds a lot of good research that businesses use. But is the lesson here that we need more defense spending? Or more DARPA spending? Or more basic research outside of the DoD?

* If the lesson is that we should have more funding for DARPA or basic research outside the DoD, then great. I'm 100% in agreement. It's a very small fraction of the budget now (I see DARPA is about 3.2B), so increasing it won't make a dent.

None of this seems relevant in the context of the very high federal spending right now. Very few of those dollars apply to the things businesses need to thrive.

And as for any moral argument, the people already paid for these things once, so it's not like something is owed any more than I still owe the grocery store for the food I bought. Yes, I will buy there again; and similarly, we shouldn't cut the government functions that are necessary for business to thrive.

But no, the Democrats at the federal level can't take credit for the police my city hired or the roads they built. And they can't use the success of DARPA to justify a bunch of things that don't resemble DARPA and cost much more money.

(For those wondering, I live in a Democrat-controlled city; and I have, when I felt it was appropriate, voted for city tax increases because I think they do a great job, notwithstanding an apparent monorail project[1]. So I'm not a "government is bad" kind of person.)

[1] That's a reference to a Simpson's episode, not meant literally.

newbie12• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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...

astine3• 14 years ago

"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.

jessriedel• 14 years ago

More to the point, the government is not horrible at funding basic research (although I think there's a case to be made that it leads to some academic pathologies) and it can occasionally even be good at building basic infrastructure. But this debate is in the context of Federal government spending, and research and infrastructure are only tiny, tiny parts.

US Federal Budget is dominated by 3 things: Defense, Medicare, and Social Security. The research arm of the DoD makes up a pretty small part of the Defense budget, and the last two, Medicare and Social Security, are both (inter-generational) redistribuions. So this whole argument over the internet is really just political stupidity, both for liberals who hold it up as an example of how effective Federal spending can be, and conservatives who want to re-write history.

cs702• 14 years ago

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.

tjic3• 14 years ago

> 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.

mfringel• 14 years ago

Let's say that the assertion "An Internet would have existed in 2000 anyway, even if the government did nothing." is true. It's unverifiable, but let's assert it.

Even if it was true, _that's not what happened._ FedGov put money into Arpanet, which led to multiple academic (and a handful of corporate research) institutions putting time, money and organizational effort into creating the current framework. That much is known.

It theoretically could have happened some other way in some alternate timeline, but in this one it happened like that, and pointing out the possibility of an alternate history doesn't change the one we have.

knowtheory2• 14 years ago

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... ). 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.

yardie• 14 years ago

How is this not verifiable? The US government still has the receipts for the equipment they ordered and paid for through Arpanet. Most of the companies (BBN, Level 3) went on to be the very first companies on the internet.

And determinism is like religion, you really have to suspend belief to say this was going to happen because __??__.

ghurlman• 14 years ago

So it probably would have happened anyway, therefore what did happen didn't happen?

_delirium• 14 years ago

That's a completely different argument, though an interesting one to have. The WSJ editorial was not arguing that hypothetically the private sector could have created the internet, even though in actual fact it didn't. That's at least a plausible claim. But the WSJ instead argued, incorrectly, that the private sector did create the internet, without significant government involvement. The main justification seems to be a claim that Ethernet is an internetworking technology and was created by Xerox, and that ARPANET shouldn't be considered significant to this history. The article is very confused, and more or less just wrong, not making any sort of interesting point about historical contingency.

brown9-22• 14 years ago

This is a funny definition of "verifiable" that the commenter you are replying to is not using.

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 a bit like saying that the USA should not be credited as the first nation to develop and use a nuclear weapon because Nazi Germany would have done the same thing if it had survived long enough.

T-hawk• 14 years ago

> 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.

Indeed. How about Fidonet? Fidonet developed as a network of interconnected BBSes, starting from 1984 and widely accessible by about 1994, without government stimulus. Fidonet had a backbone and a hierarchical structure for routing messages. It's not hard to envision a world where telecommunications companies got into that business, providing dedicated high-speed connections and lines for Fidonet (becoming an FSP rather than ISP), so that it evolved from an asynchronous modem-based network into real-time connectivity. So what we call a website could have developed from the BBS rather than from gopher servers, and what we call a browser could have evolved from Telix rather than Mosaic.

There are many alternative ways a global network could and would have developed without US government initiation. But it's also possible that the US government stimulus made it happen sooner and more centralized to the US (some of Fidonet's development came from Russia.)

imgabe• 14 years ago

Maybe they would have created a global network. Probably it would be wholly owned by AT&T and we'd all be paying $3.99 a minute to access it though.

rayiner• 14 years ago

Because a large contingent of Americans have taken a particular ideological simplification of one 1970's economics movement and turned it into a religion, rooted in faith, with the "invisible man... err hand" as its God.

SkyMarshal• 14 years ago

>Why would the Wall Street Journal publish this garbage?

It's part of the campaign to undermine Net Neutrality, 'deregulate' the Internet, and turn it over to the telecoms to run as they see fit.

If the Conservatives can convince the public that the private sector and unregulated free markets, not government, are responsible for creating the Internet as it now - a truly level platform where all comers have equal access to audiences and bandwidth (services like Akamai excepted) - then it's easy to make the case that Net Neutrality, common carrier, and all that stuff is just more government regulation that impedes progress and economic growth, or worse control what people do on the Internet.

Looks like a new front in the battle for the Internet.

nathan_long3• 14 years ago

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.

stox• 14 years ago

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.

fpgeek2• 14 years ago

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

russell2• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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.

defen• 14 years ago

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.

nateabele• 14 years ago

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.

No Credit for Uncle Sam in creating Net? Vint Cerf disagrees

Related Stories