Watched the video but I honestly can't tell if he's trolling or not ;)
Licklider knew engineers do what they are told and nothing else. So: give them a really big project or else they won't implement beyond the specifications. It seemed to worked since the Internet has been scalable. Alan Kay, every year, talks about Licklider's intergalactic network in his history of computing talk: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=alan+kay
Delay-tolerant network stacks have been deployed on NASA spacecraft.