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Comment by ilamont | Hacker News Reader

W3C is jointly hosted by the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (MIT CSAIL) in the United States, the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM) headquartered in France, Keio University in Japan and Beihang University in China.

Beihang University spends roughly 60% of its research budget on defense research (https://www.aspi.org.au/report/china-defence-universities-tr...). The People's Republic of China has done everything it can to shut down the open Web (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/chinas-global-reach-su...) while turning digital platforms, communications networks, and other technologies into tools of mass control and surveillance. Why is Beihang involved in hosting the W3C?

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For comparison, can we look at what portion of MIT's research grants are Defense related? MIT being the US host.

I wouldn't be surprised if it's similar, but I haven't found it lazily googling.

Most academic CS and IT research in the US is defense-funded, has been all along. Most other countries too. So any reasonable academic home of a web-related entity is likely to have it's research budget be mostly defense funded.

> For comparison, can we look at what portion of MIT's research grants are Defense related? MIT being the US host.

I think we should absolutely do that. MIT's figure is going to be nowhere close to 60%.

https://web.mit.edu/fnl/vol/155/numbers_research_total.htm

> Most academic CS and IT research in the US is defense-funded, has been all along.

That also is false. It's nowhere close to "most" across all US CS and IT research.

https://ir.mit.edu/research-expenditures#block-yui_3_17_2_1_...

2020 numbers. DOD is 17%

Thanks for the details. Department of Defence is listed at 18% MIT-wide, which is not close to 60%, true. It is the #1 source of research funds.

Curious what the Department of Energy grants are about, and what overlap it ends up having with defense purposes if it's nuclear. That's the second biggest source of research funding at 15%. 18+15==33%, still not 60%.

> That also is false. It's nowhere close to "most" across all US CS and IT research.

I'd be curious to see numbers for that too, for MIT CS department(s) specifically, and in general in the US. I have definitely known a lot of CS professors and projects with DARPA and other DoD funding, it is quite common.

“Campus” is subtle because it doesn’t count the roughly $1B of military funding that goes to Lincoln Lab, an MIT subsidiary

ooh, good catch.

https://www.afcea.org/content/air-force-continues-2-billion-...

And maybe substantially more...

Wow, the total amount of "research expenditures" "on campus" in the earlier chart was only $447 million.

And here we have a $9.6 billion contract (albeit not for just one year, i'm sure) that wasn't included... it does seem like that earlier chart was not very comprehensive.

When you ask people about The Internet, the parts they describe were mostly funded by the NSF and venture capital. DARPA has been largely out of the picture for a long, long time.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Science_Foundation_...

Notably NCSA, which provided the first telnet client, web browser and web server that most people used prior to the DotCom boom.

Defense based funds were generally avoided by universities in Japan. Reasons are linked to WWII result and top professors were left wing.

> Why is Beihang involved in hosting the W3C?

Why is MIT? Do you not have an issue with them also getting funding from the American defense department? Or if you're concerned with the open web, do you not remember when they persecuted Aaron Swartz for the heinous crime of downloading knowledge?

More than the military budget, the reluctance to let the population access an unfiltered internet is problematic. The CCP is trying to create a separate network from the global one, this raises many questions.

Probably because it's a representative from a country with 18% of the total people on the planet.

Hard to call oneself a standards community if you're missing representation from nearly a fifth of all users.

Then why isn't one of the IITs on the list? Or a university in South America, Africa, or the Middle East?

Excellent questions.

Too poor, their alumni don't give back to their alma mater

18% of the world population, but what is relevant is the % of web users. This country denies its citizen the benefits of an open web and treats the ability to route around censorship like a bug to fix. Why give someone a seat at a committee steering something they openly want to sabotage?

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