Contrary to legend, it wasn't the federal government, and the Internet had nothing to do with maintaining communications during a war.
By L. GORDON CROVITZ, WSJ Opinion, July 22, 2012
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."
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.
For many technologists, the idea of the Internet traces to Vannevar Bush, the
presidential science adviser during World War II who oversaw the development of
radar and the Manhattan Project. In a 1946 article in The Atlantic titled "As We
May Think," Bush defined an ambitious peacetime goal for technologists: Build
what he called a "memex" through which "wholly new forms of encyclopedias will
appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready
to be dropped into the memex and there amplified."
That fired imaginations, and by the 1960s technologists were trying to
connect separate physical communications networks into one global network—a
"world-wide web." The federal government was involved, modestly, via the
Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency Network. Its goal was not
maintaining communications during a nuclear attack, and it didn't build the
Internet. Robert Taylor, who ran the ARPA program in the 1960s, sent an email to
fellow technologists in 2004 setting the record straight: "The creation of the
Arpanet was not motivated by considerations of war. The Arpanet was not an
Internet. An Internet is a connection between two or more computer
networks."
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.
According to a book about Xerox PARC, "Dealers of Lightning" (by Michael
Hiltzik), its top researchers realized they couldn't wait for the government to
connect different networks, so would have to do it themselves. "We have a more
immediate problem than they do," Robert Metcalfe told his colleague John Shoch
in 1973. "We have more networks than they do." Mr. Shoch later recalled that
ARPA staffers "were working under government funding and university contracts.
They had contract administrators . . . and all that slow, lugubrious behavior to
contend with."
So having created the Internet, why didn't Xerox become the biggest company
in the world? The answer explains the disconnect between a government-led view
of business and how innovation actually happens.
Executives at Xerox headquarters in Rochester, N.Y., were focused on selling
copiers. From their standpoint, the Ethernet was important only so that people
in an office could link computers to share a copier. Then, in 1979, Steve Jobs
negotiated an agreement whereby Xerox's venture-capital division invested $1
million in Apple, with the requirement that Jobs get a full briefing on all the
Xerox PARC innovations. "They just had no idea what they had," Jobs later said,
after launching hugely profitable Apple computers using concepts developed by
Xerox.
Xerox's copier business was lucrative for decades, but the company eventually
had years of losses during the digital revolution. Xerox managers can console
themselves that it's rare for a company to make the transition from one
technology era to another.
As for the government's role, the Internet was fully privatized in 1995, when
a remaining piece of the network run by the National Science Foundation was
closed—just as the commercial Web began to boom. Economist Tyler Cowen wrote in
2005: "The Internet, in fact, reaffirms the basic free market critique of large
government. 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."
It's important to understand the history of the Internet because it's too
often wrongly cited to justify big government. It's also important to recognize
that building great technology businesses requires both innovation and the
skills to bring innovations to market. As the contrast between Xerox and Apple
shows, few business leaders succeed in this challenge. Those who do—not the
government—deserve the credit for making it happen.
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