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Comment by jostmey | Hacker News Reader

I find it worrisome when government declares it is time to protect the internet. The internet has flourished just fine without intervention.

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The internet was born out of government intervention.

He said "flourished". The state of being implemented by some basic government-funded research is almost completely disconnected from the time when commercial interests took the idea and ran with it -- causing it to "flourish".

The internet wasn't implemented by some basic government funded research. It was designed and built under a DARPA project and designed and implemented by key pieces of the military industrial complex (BBN, etc). It was run by the DOD and "flourished" long before it was commercialized.

The Internet isn't ARPANET any more than Ethernet is ALOHA.

The technology that made the Internet possible was almost exclusively private sector technology. The desire, effort and vision to put together large networks was already in place by the time the government made their move.

The government helped, no question about it, but all the pieces were already there to make it happen. The private sector was driving that direction and would have built out very large networks regardless of the government.

The record contradicts what you are saying here; what you've written is almost a perfect inversion of historical fact. All the commercial networks being developed or deployed when the Internet was being invented were circuit switched, centralized networks. They really didn't have anything to do with the Internet at all. The design philosophy behind the Internet [1, Section 3] was drastically different than all commercial efforts at the time. The design was so different and so unique compared to existing work that the inventors won a Turing Award for it.

As an aside, all of the above is typically covered in the first week or two of a networking course (I like Brighten Godfrey's [2]).

[1] http://ccr.sigcomm.org/archive/1995/jan95/ccr-9501-clark.pdf

[2] http://courses.engr.illinois.edu/cs538/

So did the wild west.

I never knew why they called it the wild west. It was very tame.

Well, every once in a while the government would come by and regulate a population out of existence for security reasons. But that was the old days, they're totally trustworthy and non-murdery now.

When you say this are you ignoring or denying the experience of Native Americans? Because from what I understand tame is not a word often used to describe the Trail of Tears or Wounded Knee.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Indian_Wars

The Wild West refers to the west when Americans first started settling in the West and were largely out of the reaches of the army and federal government.

When the west was being "settled" who living there at the time?

Put another way: Are you arguing that the wild west period was a peaceful and prosperous time for the Native Americans? A period marked by little physical or economic violence?

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