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(108,903 posts) Mon Jul 23, 2012, 05:48 PM Jul 2012

Yes, Government Researchers Really Did Invent the Internet

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2012/07/23/yes-government-researchers-really-did-invent-the-internet/

“It’s an urban legend that the government launched the Internet,” writes Gordon Crovitz in an opinion piece in today’s Wall Street Journal. Most histories cite the Pentagon-backed ARPANet as the Internet’s immediate predecessor, but that view undersells the importance of research conducted at Xerox PARC labs in the 1970s, claims Crovitz. In fact, Crovitz implies that, if anything, government intervention gummed up the natural process of laissez faire innovation. “The Internet was fully privatized in 1995,” says Crovitz, “just as the commercial Web began to boom.” The implication is clear: the Internet could only become the world-changing force it is today once big government got out of the way.

But Crovitz’s story is based on a profound misunderstanding of not only history, but technology. Most egregiously, Crovitz seems to confuse the Internet—at heart, a set of protocols designed to allow far-flung computer networks to communicate with one another—with Ethernet, a protocol for connecting nearby computers into a local network. (Robert Metcalfe, a researcher at Xerox PARC who co-invented the Ethernet protocol, today tweeted tongue-in-cheek “Is it possible I invented the whole damn Internet?”)

The most important part of what we now know of as the Internet is the TCP/IP protocol, which was invented by Vincent Cerf and Robert Kahn. Crovitz mentions TCP/IP, but only in passing, calling it (correctly) “the Internet’s backbone.” He fails to mention that Cerf and Kahn developed TCP/IP while working on a government grant.

Other commenters, including Timothy B. Lee at Ars Technica and veteran technology reporter Steve Wildstrom, have noted that Crovitz’s misunderstandings run deep. He also manages to confuse the World Wide Web (incidentally, invented by Tim Berners Lee while working at CERN, a government-funded research laboratory) with hyperlinks, and an internet—a link between two computers—with THE Internet.