*For instance, it's well known by all who lack a reality-bias that "dotcoms" appeared FIRST on the internet, well before .edu, .gov etc, enterprises that lacked a profit motive and, worse yet, weren't even owned by the scrupulously accurate Murdoch family.
Date: Mon, 23 Jul 2012 11:47:28 PDT
From: "Peter G. Neumann"
Subject: Who Really Invented the Internet?
In a really egregious piece of so-called journalism relating to the
Internet, L. Gordon Crovitz has written item in the *Wall Street Journal*,
23 Jul 2012, with the above Subject line:
It's an urban legend that the government launched the Internet. The myth
is that the Pentagon created the Internet to keep its communications lines
up even in a nuclear strike. The truth is a more interesting story about
how innovation happens – and about how hard it is to build successful
technology companies even once the government gets out of the way.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB100008723963904444643045775390630084
06518.html?mod=WSJ_article_comments#articleTabs%article
Crovitz's thesis seems to imply that U.S. Government funding did not have a
major role in development network technology, with a perhaps not-so-hidden
agenda that government funding is an undesirable interference in private
enterprise?
His article has led to a huge flurry of corrective items on the Web,
pointing out numerous misstatements. To make a long story short, Crovitz
seems to confuse The Internet with internetting and networking, confuse
internetting with the ethernet, and somehow miss the fact that Vint Cerf and
Bob Kahn were first funded by and then worked for ARPA! Hawaii's AlohaNet
(Frank Kuo and Norm Abramson) preceded ethernet, also government funded.
SRI's packet-switched radio experiment is generally credited as being the
first real "internetworking" demonstration, linking 3 different networks
(also government funded), and recently celebrated at the Computer History
Museum. Without those impeti or impetuses, might we still have only circuit
switching and even analog telephony? (By the way, ARPA also contributed
considerably to the pioneering Multics development.)
Joseph Lorenzo Hall noted in Dave Farber's IP distribution that
*ArsTechnica's* Timothy Berners Lee penned a superb rejoinder:
WSJ mangles history to argue government didn't launch the Internet
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/07/wsj-mangles-history-to-argue-government-didnt-launch-the-internet/
Also, see the *Scientific American*: Yes, Government Researchers Really Did
Invent the Internet:
But perhaps the most damning rebuttal comes from Michael Hiltzik, the
author of "Dealers of Lightning," a history of Xerox PARC that Crovitz
uses as his main source for material. "While I'm gratified in a sense that
he cites my book," writes Hiltzik, "it's my duty to point out that he's
wrong. My book bolsters, not contradicts, the argument that the Internet
had its roots in the ARPANet, a government project."
http://j.mp/NQtACW (Scientific American)
Lauren Weinstein commented in his Network Neutrality Squad, Privacy Forum,
and People for Internet Responsibility,
``This Wall Street Journal "opinion piece" really mucked up big time. And
the sense of some associated political motivation is difficult to ignore.
The fact is, without ARPA/IPTO, there would not be an Internet as we know
it today. Period. Other networks would have very likely developed of
course, probably along the lines of various pay-per-packet, walled garden
modalities that the dominant ISPs seem hell-bent at deploying today – but
not the end-to-end ARPANET/Internet model that has been so very crucial to
the spread and wide availability of these technologies.
