>I heard Peter Schwartz on NPR today saying that the government offered the
>Internet to AT&T in 1978 and 1988. The company turned down the offer
>saying that it had no commercial value. Can anybody verify that story?
I'm just guessing, but might AT&T have been right in 1978? From an institutional perspective at least. If memory serves, AT&T were not allowed to go down the path of service provision according to the 1956 Consent Decree, and they'd lost their control over much of their erstwhile R&D plant by the same decree. They'd have regained those rights after the 1982 divestiture Decree, but even then the advent of the web would still have been unthinkable, no? And AT&T suddenly had a world to win with stuff it already had.
But I'd love to know if this were true. I also hear MCI has a large part to play in 'internet ll'. Something to do with current domain name capacity limitations has 'forced' our innovators to look for a new platform.
No doubt one with a more centralised and controllable nature ...
Cheers, Rob.