> A little late, I know, but the Internet doesn't really provide a
> counterexample. The framework for the 'net was created by the Department of
> Defense. No company, certainly no entrepreneur, would have had the
> resources to create the 'net, and had they had the resources they would not
> have invested them in developing the digital infrastructure of a wholly
> unproven technology. ... Even the
> first revolutionary web browser, MOSAIC, was developed at the National
> Center for Supercomputing Applications, a federal agency.
And the web itself at CERN, a European gov't-supported facilty. Interesting that the help for Internet Explorer still includes a credit to Mosaic, and it was Mosaic people plus an entrepreneur who started Netscape.
> Left to industry
> and individual entrepreneurs, there would have been no internet revolution.
> When one points this out to online Libertarian blowhards, they tend to shut
> up for a minute or two. But only for a minute or two, unfortunately.
All quite true, but a possible reply would be to point to Bell Labs, research arm of AT&T, as big and capitalist an organisation as you could get, who developed lots of things the net would not exist without. Notably information theory and the transistor, but also Unix, C, ...
Of course, that doesn't do much to advance a libertarian thesis, since AT&T benefits hugely from a gov't-imposed monopoly and Shannon's wartime work on cryptography is one of the foundations of information theory and ...
-- Sandy Harris, Quanzhou, Fujian, China