EdRooney said:
Sorry, I'm unclear on this. How does the US military inventing the internet on my tax dime count as the free market at work?
It is a common misconception to think that DARPA "invented" the Internet. It is a urban legend that gets repeated so often that most people assume it to be the truth.
The DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) under the Pentagon did not invent, built or constructed the Internet. What DARPA gave us was just the TCP/IP protocol, which is the basic network protocol that the internet is build on. At the time, DARPA used the TCP/IP protocol to build private networks for military use. The TCP/IP protocol was also used for universities to build academic networks to share research and experience. However, the TCP/IP was not the first networking protocol nor was it necessarily the best. There were other protocols being developed at the time that could have replaced TCP/IP just as well (i.e. CYCLADES). However, for a series of reasons of convenience, it was decided that the TCP/IP protocol would be the unified standard for the Internet. The Internet could very well have been built around any other privately developed networking protocol at the time, but alas, destiny had it that it would be the TCP/IP developed by the military. That is where the critical involvement of the military/government on the Internet ends.
The Internet is a extremely complex network, made-up of thousands and thousands of miles of fiber, millions of routers, DNS servers, firewalls, etc... The overwhelming majority of this infrastructure was developed, build and maintained by private businesses and individuals. It was companies like IBM, AT&T, Qwest, AOL, Compuserve, Delphi, SUN that first understood the commercial potential of making computer networks available to regular people and businesses. It was them who really made the investment, did the heavy lifting, took the risk and turned the tiny, highly restricted and very limited, ASCII only academic networks of the time into the massive, reliable, user friendly and fast global network that we call the Internet today. DARPA nor the government envision at the time that TCP/IP or computer networks would ever become ubiquitous around the world and an engine of economic growth. TCP/IP was just a protocol to fulfill a specified military project, that was all. It was not the government nor the military, like AL Gore and others like to claim that allowed the Internet to happen.
Had the government not developed TCP/IP, we would just be using one of the many alternative private developed protocols that were being worked on at the time in its place.
