Obama Was Right: The Government Invented the Internet

ACTUALLY, in 1961, Leonard Kleinrock of MIT invented the concept of wide area networks in his paper "Information Flow In Large Communication Nets" (1).

After that, in 1964, a RAND employee by the name of Paul Baran wrote a paper entitled "On Distributed Communications Networks"(2), furthering the concepts outlined by Kleinrock.

It wasn't until AFTER Lawrence Roberts, also of MIT, wrote "Towards a Cooperative Network of Time-Shared Computers", that ARPA funded research on the idea.

FINALLY, it was National Physical Laboratory in England that created the first wide-area packet switching network in 1967.

So, NO, the government didn't INVENT the Internet. They built a closed, packet switching network that the public could not access, based on principles and ideas generated at a smattering of schools and PRIVATE COMPANIES.

(1) http://www.lk.cs.ucla.edu/LK/Bib/REPORT/PhD/ (2) http://www.rand.org/about/history/baran.html