| | | Government Didn’t Create the Internet
People often say that the government created the Internet. This is not true.
The Internet is a trillion dollars of fiber optic cables laid in the ground and under our oceans. Fiber optic technology was developed by corporations, such as Corning Glasworks, not the government. The trillion dollars in capital that was used to pay for laying cable came from Wall Street, not the government.
The one thing you might be able to credit the government with is standards. The early days of computing were a hodge-podge of networking standards. Only computers from the same vendor could talk to each other -- indeed, often only the same model of computers. The situation was like the railroad network in the pre Civil-War South: each state’s rail network had different gauge tracks, different widths, different turn radiuses, different slopes. As cargo was shipped across the South, it needed to be offloaded from one rail network and loaded onto another, several times. After the Civil War, the U.S. government decreed a common railroad standard for the entire country so that it could move troops quickly to anywhere in the country to suppress insurrections.
In much the same way, around 1980, governments around the world, working with international standards organizations, created the " OSI" or "Open Systems Interconnect" group. The purpose of OSI was to create a single standard for all networks, to create a world wide "internetwork" that all computers could be connected to. By 1990, developed countries (US, Europe, Japan) had laws called " GOSIP" or “Government OSI Profile” that required all computers purchased by the government must support the OSI network standard. All large corporations, such as IBM and HP, supported this standard with their computers.
What’s important about the Internet is that the OSI standard failed. It’s not the standard of today’s Internet. The government backed the wrong horse, so to speak. Instead, today’s Internet is based on TCP/IP -- a networking standard the government tried to kill off.
Back around 1980, there were many networking standards. One early effort to interconnect computers was known as BITNET. Most big universities had IBM mainframes. BITNET allowed those mainframes to be interconnected, so that people could exchange data and email. Another early effort was uucp, that exchanged email over dialup lines (and other network connections, including TCP/IP and BITNET connections). DEC (Digital Equipment Corp.) was a hub for a lot of this uucp traffic. Much of this funding came from private sources, not the government. If there was a world wide network in that day, it was X.25, a networking standard supported by the telephone companies and used by big corporations.
The government was also involved. It was the height of the Cold War and the era of the “Star Wars” missile defense system. The Department of Defense (DoD) was throwing money at anything that might have military application.
When government agencies funded a research project, it would be a collaboration among researchers at different universities. The DoD wanted them to be able to talk to each other. Since the most popular computer system among their researchers was BSD Unix, the DoD paid a consulting firm ( BBN) to add two networking standards to BSD Unix: Xerox XNS (one of many commercial network standards) and TCP/IP (one of many research network standards).
TCP/IP quickly grew to become the most popular research network standard. Unlike commercial standards (like Xerox’s XNS), no single entity controlled TCP/IP. Universities were free to redefine the standards at will. And that’s what they did.
During the 1980s, this was the question of TCP/IP: nobody really controlled standards. Those who might have controlled standards declared the nascent TCP/IP internetwork an "official anarchy". Those who preferred company controlled standards (from Xerox or IBM), or government standards (like OSI), looked down upon TCP/IP, declaring it would never work. How could standards exist without somebody putting their official stamp of approval on it?
But, it did work. De facto standards developed by acclamation, not proclamation. It worked thusly: two (or more) independent groups developed a way for computers to interoperate on a task (such as exchange email), then they would document what they did so that anybody else could interoperate with them. You were free to interoperate with them, or create a different way of solving the problem. When it became obvious that most everyone was using the standard that worked the best, then and only then was it declared as something like an “official standard”. In fact, much of TCP/IP is inspired by corporations. They paid get get something working, and then documented it so that others could interoperate, which then became Internet standards.
This was in sharp contrast to OSI. The way that OSI worked is that everyone would get together and spend years going to meetings, fighting for what they wanted in the official standard.
Eventually something would be created that tried to satisfy everyone, and a standard would be published. At this point, people would try to implement it. I say "try" because it didn’t actually work. Such standards were so bloated with features that they could never be fully implemented, and were full of problems that you would only find while trying to implement the standard. As a consequence, different people trying to implement the OSI standards could never really get their stuff to interoperate with each other.
So both sides thought the other side wouldn’t work. Those working on TCP/IP standards felt that official standards process would never produce something that worked, and the official standards bodies believed that nothing would work without an official stamp of approval. Even while Netscape was going IPO, setting off the dot-com revolution, government (and big corporations sucking from the government teat) believed that OSI was the long term, and that the TCP/IP Internet was just a temporary research project.
So who gets credit for creating the Internet? Government? The military? Big corporations? Universities?
The answer is "all the above". The Internet is the product of a free society, everyone working together, and sometimes working at odds with each other. It's a triumph of an "official anarchy".
Government threw money at many networks, including the TCP/IP Internet. TCP/IP was influenced by many things, among them the government. But what government most gave TCP/IP was its benign neglect as it spent its guidance, vision, leadership, and energy on developing the OSI network. This history important. If you believe those who say that it's government's unique vision that created the Internet, then you would naturally believe that the government should continue with their successful strategy of regulating and controlling the Internet. If you believe, as I do, that it’s the product of "official anarchy", then you would agree that government should continue keeping its hands off the Internet.
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