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Comment by hencq | Hacker News Reader

The article makes that exact point:

> Only governments had the long view and available cash to fund things like supercolliders, deep space programs and - oh yeah - the development of the Internet.

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Thats not true. There was no long view government plan to create what we now call the Internet.

The whole point of blue-sky R&D funding is that you can't plan exactly what you're going to get out of it. Today DARPA is a bit more focused on practical application than it used to be, but it's ethos is still: "let's throw $10-30 million at a bunch of smart people and see what happens." The "plan" is to fund fundamental R&D and hope something really useful comes out of it. In that sense, the development of the internet was a fulfillment of that plan.

Exactly! Nearly any concerted focus on a difficult engineering problem (ex: NASA) will yield positive externalities in the form of engineering improvement (manufacturing methods, chip design, solar, etc.).

If your engineering challenge is putting filters on pictures, you're probably going to have less positive spillovers - not that you wouldn't be solving a real problem, but it's a different kind of thing.

I haven't done any kind of scientific survey, but it seems the best government projects are those without any kind of expectation of anyone profiting or making the money back.

Not that I don't like profit motives. I love them. But if there is a profit motive, you have to really really question why private industry isn't doing it instead.

DARPA is amazing, at least for their history and what has come from them.

Dies any other country have a DARPA equivalent? Or, more specifically, did any other country have a DARPA equivalent 40+ years ago?

I'm sure Russia would at least have something like it.

DARPA is a very interesting agency. It's got a $3.2 billion budget, but less than 250 employees and more than half are technical people. They're structured to maximize the amount of money that goes to the actual engineering teams and minimize internal inertia. The program managers get $20 million or so to throw around each year, and have tremendous authority over their projects and not a lot of oversight. They're on the younger side for people with that kind of budget authority and usually have PhD's themselves. They're limited to 4-5 year stints, so it's not a position that attracts people looking to make a career in bureaucracy.

ARPA itself was a direct response to the soviet's ability to allocate assets to state innovation like sputnik.

Maybe if government wasn't so massively wasteful, there'd be a few dollars to throw at blue-sky R&D funding these days, but there isn't.

"blue-sky R&D funding" is the definition of "massive waste" to many people. To you, it's probably feeding poor children or something else.

But there were government plans to create telecom networks that ultimately led to the internet.

While there was a ton of amazing stuff going on inside Bell Labs, it really seems like progress in telecom didn't accelerate until after the ATT breakup. If you think the cell phone situation now is bad, you used to have to rent your home phone, like a cable box, from the phone company.

dreamdu5t you are so wrong that you deserve to be onvoted, but I dont do that. The basic IP technology was all government funded and developed by BB&N. The original internet was ARPAnet, funded by the government to link the government, military, universities, and military contractors (.gov, .mil, .edu, and .com). The Internet itself was set up separate from DARPAnet by government legislation and funding. The whole domain registration mechanism was at one time under the ultimate control of the Commerce Department. The world wide web protocol was developed at CERN, funded by multiple governments. The browser that became Netscape was developed at the University of Illinois. It was only after the Internet was set by the government did we get the explosion of users and applications. The competitors to the the internet developed by private corporations, like MCI mail or Prodigy, are all dead now.

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