Comment by fleitz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fleitz | Hacker News Reader

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"The internet" was hardly created by government funding, yes, DARPA funded TCP/IP and CERN funded Tim Berners Lee, but if you're going to ascribe the entire internet to the government because they funded the initial R&D that led to fundamental pieces of it being developed then you might as well ascribe the internet to Bell Labs because they invented the transistor.

Why not say that ordinary people are the funders of all this tech because if they didn't pay taxes, the state would not exist...

As with all things all these achievements were possible because of the giants who came before.

That's what's so stupid about the entire article. You could just as easily make a case that everything we have today is the result of gentlemen scientists from the renaissance. Or that Alexander the Great is the inventor of all of western civilization.

> That's what's so stupid about the entire article. You could just as easily make a case that everything we have today is the result of gentlemen scientists from the renaissance Or that Alexander the Great is the inventor of all of western civilization..

No, the article does not overgeneralise, your comment does.

The proposition is that a substantial proportion of particular quite well-defined 'innovation' was created through state systems as opposed to private commerce.

If, in order to argue against that, you have to generalise so much that one can almost no longer say anything causes anything, because everything causes everything, you end up saying nothing. You have not refuted something, you have just made up a more meaningless way of measuring anything.

The government role in the internet was considerably deeper than just funding the early protocol work, though it was definitely not the only player. It's a fairly good example of the public/private innovation networks thesis the book being reviewed here is arguing for. Abbate's book Inventing the Internet (MIT Press, 1999) has a pretty good account of all the various players and how they related.

Not to mention, it's trying to put paid to all those who think that th government shouldn't be involved in research. There are a hell of a lot of those sorts out there.

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