The Innovative State: Governments Should Make Markets, Not Just Fix Them

foreignaffairs.com

9 points·jonathansizz··4 comments

I'm not so sure about this article. It states that government funding invented the internet. This isn't true. Government funding did indeed help to create the foundation of what became the internet, but for years they didn't know what to do with the technology. It wasn't until entrepreneurs got involved in the early-mid 90s that things started to shift towards what we know as the internet today.

>Government funding did indeed help to create the foundation of what became the internet, but for years they didn't know what to do with the technology.

That's not really true. They built it for the military and for academia. It flowered in these environments, and in fact most of today's internet infrastructure was built in academia, by academia, for academia.

Commercialization just also wasn't that great. Out of all my most-used websites, only the social-media sites and newspapers are commercial businesses. Everything else I like on the web is basically just someone's organization or hobby, sometimes with some ads to keep it going monetarily (and often not even that, since running a small personal webserver nowadays is so cheap that people can do it for kicks).

Government funding did indeed help to create the foundation of what became the internet, but for years they didn't know what to do with the technology.

that's part of where the current situation comes from.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh%E2%80%93Dole_Act

A law passed in 1980 which enables private ownership of the results of government research. Part of the justification:

"The U.S. government had accumulated 28,000 patents but fewer than 5% of those patents were commercially licensed."

Isn't this a sort of generalization of the military-industrial complex?

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