Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

No Credit for Uncle Sam in creating Net? Vint Cerf disagrees

news.cnet.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 79 posts

Re: No Credit for Uncle Sam in creating Net? Vint Cerf disagrees

#41

Post by brown9-2 »

tjic wrote: post #26
cs702 wrote: post #8

Why would anyone try to revise history, casting doubt on the verifiable fact that the U.S. government deserves credit for funding and helping create the Internet? Why would the Wall Street Journal publish this garbage? Short, simplistic answer: because the mere existence of this article, published in a newspaper widely perceived as reputable, is "evidence" of debate about the government's role for all those politicia…

> verifiable fact that the U.S. government deserves credit for funding and helping create the Internet? Because it's NOT verifiable. Some of us believe in historical determinism. Moore's Law meant that chips were getting better and cheaper. Telecommunications was growing. People were already using modems to build ad-hoc networks. I argue that there was going to be an internet in the year 2000 whether or not the US go…

This is a funny definition of "verifiable" that the commenter you are replying to is not using.

I argue that there was going to be an internet in the year 2000 whether or not the US government pushed a piddly amount of funding into Arpanet or not.

This is a bit like saying that the USA should not be credited as the first nation to develop and use a nuclear weapon because Nazi Germany would have done the same thing if it had survived long enough.

Re: No Credit for Uncle Sam in creating Net? Vint Cerf disagrees

#42

Post by mrj »

astine wrote: post #27
HotKFreshSwag wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A "little funding", are you serious? DARPA is part of the freaking DoD. Are you really going to criticize the government for investing in American companies of which a couple ones failed on a VC news site. Yeah, companies fail. Yeah, the American government invests in American companies. Yeah, the American government can afford it. Right now the US treasury bonds that are indexed to inflation have negative interest r…

"Are you really going to criticize the government for investing in American companies of which a couple ones failed on a VC news site." I am. The government is not a VC firm. It's investment are invariably political and not business based. There's a huge potential for waste there, not to mention conflict of interest. A DoD project that happened to have civilian applications is a different beast entirely.

The problem can't always be left up to pure market forces, though. VCs do not fund projects that they don't believe will stand a chance of producing a large return. They may fund several ideas with a small chance, but a business that will provide for the greater good, cost a lot of money up front, and only provide small returns simply won't get funded. Sometimes government must be used to provide for the greater good or it won't happen at all.

The greater good is often politically based, it's true. It may not be business-based at all. Fundamentally, a politician can use any issue as a talking point, and certainly, a politician that funds an idea that creates something good will use that for their own gain or another's detriment. But simply because an idea is politically based doesn't mean it is not worth pursuing, or that the business world would do it any better.

In a way, this is what the government is doing in solar. Solar companies need to be funded and researched now before the market makes solar (and alternative energies in general) viable on a large scale. Right now solar is too expensive to produce and the price of oil gives little incentive to change habits. For the greater good, companies must be founded and research performed that will ultimately decimate the entire energy sector of the economy. Few VCs are going to be interested in destroying value, and yet we must do this before it is forced on us by the limits of the natural world.

It is not a perfect vehicle but only the government has the pockets and patience to make that happen. Some will fail. That does not mean we should never try though. That means all those on the sidelines cheering for government failure should instead try to assist with better solutions and better oversight. Most are happier to criticize and make sweeping judgements though.

Re: No Credit for Uncle Sam in creating Net? Vint Cerf disagrees

#43

Post by mseebach »

lutze wrote: post #36
mseebach wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good thing that's not what I said, then.

Your comment seemed quite sarcastic, and looked to be trying to equivocate responsibility. Not that I'm above using sarcasm myself, obviously. The fact is, that in this instance, a Murdoch owned media company is clearly distorting the truth to further a political agenda. So in this instance, it is perfectly reasonable to criticise Murdoch in particular, without having to resort to qualifications. In my opinion of cou…

You implied causation between working for a Murdoch-owned media outlet and writing a column with a light take on the facts.

That's fallacious, and that's why I called it out.

Re: No Credit for Uncle Sam in creating Net? Vint Cerf disagrees

#44

Post by brown9-2 »

twoodfin wrote: post #12
rondon1 wrote: post #6

The republicans want to frame the presidential race as Big government vs. small government. "Romney wants to let the free market fuel America's success while Obama wants the government to your money and spend it how they see fit" Obama has recently tried to point out that the success of the free market in America has been dependent on the US Government. "Someone built the road and bridges and someone educated your em…

"Someone built the road and bridges and someone educated your employees, and someone built they internet that you use. Those things were funded by tax dollars." All of that's true, but it's also true that the guy who didn't build a business also gets to use those roads and the internet. It's also true that private spending on telecommunications infrastructure in this country utterly dwarfs public spending. And nobody…

real marginal tax rates that will approach 50+%

Can you elaborate on this? It seems to me that the proposal for restoring the highest bracket's marginal tax rate to what it was prior to 2001 would restore it to 39.6%.

Re: No Credit for Uncle Sam in creating Net? Vint Cerf disagrees

#45

Post by T-hawk »

tjic wrote: post #26
cs702 wrote: post #8

Why would anyone try to revise history, casting doubt on the verifiable fact that the U.S. government deserves credit for funding and helping create the Internet? Why would the Wall Street Journal publish this garbage? Short, simplistic answer: because the mere existence of this article, published in a newspaper widely perceived as reputable, is "evidence" of debate about the government's role for all those politicia…

> verifiable fact that the U.S. government deserves credit for funding and helping create the Internet? Because it's NOT verifiable. Some of us believe in historical determinism. Moore's Law meant that chips were getting better and cheaper. Telecommunications was growing. People were already using modems to build ad-hoc networks. I argue that there was going to be an internet in the year 2000 whether or not the US go…

> I argue that there was going to be an internet in the year 2000 whether or not the US government pushed a piddly amount of funding into Arpanet or not.

Indeed. How about Fidonet? Fidonet developed as a network of interconnected BBSes, starting from 1984 and widely accessible by about 1994, without government stimulus. Fidonet had a backbone and a hierarchical structure for routing messages. It's not hard to envision a world where telecommunications companies got into that business, providing dedicated high-speed connections and lines for Fidonet (becoming an FSP rather than ISP), so that it evolved from an asynchronous modem-based network into real-time connectivity. So what we call a website could have developed from the BBS rather than from gopher servers, and what we call a browser could have evolved from Telix rather than Mosaic.

There are many alternative ways a global network could and would have developed without US government initiation. But it's also possible that the US government stimulus made it happen sooner and more centralized to the US (some of Fidonet's development came from Russia.)

Re: No Credit for Uncle Sam in creating Net? Vint Cerf disagrees

#46

Post by [deleted] »

tjic wrote: post #26
cs702 wrote: post #8

Why would anyone try to revise history, casting doubt on the verifiable fact that the U.S. government deserves credit for funding and helping create the Internet? Why would the Wall Street Journal publish this garbage? Short, simplistic answer: because the mere existence of this article, published in a newspaper widely perceived as reputable, is "evidence" of debate about the government's role for all those politicia…

> verifiable fact that the U.S. government deserves credit for funding and helping create the Internet? Because it's NOT verifiable. Some of us believe in historical determinism. Moore's Law meant that chips were getting better and cheaper. Telecommunications was growing. People were already using modems to build ad-hoc networks. I argue that there was going to be an internet in the year 2000 whether or not the US go…

[deleted]

Re: No Credit for Uncle Sam in creating Net? Vint Cerf disagrees

#47

Post by spamizbad »

cloverich wrote: post #25
rondon1 wrote: post #6

The republicans want to frame the presidential race as Big government vs. small government. "Romney wants to let the free market fuel America's success while Obama wants the government to your money and spend it how they see fit" Obama has recently tried to point out that the success of the free market in America has been dependent on the US Government. "Someone built the road and bridges and someone educated your em…

While true of Republicans, imo the quoted argument is equally dogmatic. Its not as though its used as a simple painting of Government as symbiotic; today's liberal arguments take it much further. Something like the following: "Government invented the internet. And without government, NO ONE would have invented the internet." That, imo, is silly. PEOPLE invented the internet. There's time's and places where private in…

> today's liberal arguments take it much further. Something like the following: "Government invented the internet. And without government, NO ONE would have invented the internet."

The "free market" versions of the Internet were the walled-gardens of AOL, CompuServe, Prodigy, etc. I'm not sure if you've ever used them, but I did and let me tell you - they all sucked compared to the Internet, even in 1994-95.

Re: No Credit for Uncle Sam in creating Net? Vint Cerf disagrees

#48

Post by gruseom »

biot wrote: post #11
stuff4ben wrote: post #4

Key quote: "Cerf: I would happily fertilize my tomatoes with Crovitz' assertion."

The claim he's referencing: Here for 30 years the government had an immensely useful protocol for transferring information, TCP/IP, but it languished...In less than a decade, private concerns have taken that protocol and created one of the most important technological revolutions of the millennia. Is Cerf's argument against the notion that it was private concerns that created the internet on top of a languishing prot…

Government funded the basic R&D; industry commercialized it. Has there been any real controversy about the history? It doesn't seem so. It's just that some ideologues don't like some of the facts.

Re: No Credit for Uncle Sam in creating Net? Vint Cerf disagrees

#49

Post by knowtheory »

tjic wrote: post #39
knowtheory wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What the WSJ is trying to do here, and what you're doing by carrying their water is incredibly insidious. You can claim that there would have been a global communications infrastructure anyway, but that ignores the vitally important question of what assumptions that network would rely upon, and who would push its growth, and to what (or whose) ends. There's a Deep Space Nine episode which touches on an alternative to…

> what you're doing by carrying their water is incredibly insidious. You lost points for assuming the worst possible motivation of my actions. "Carry their water"? Meaning "To do someone's bidding; to serve someone's interests." PLEASE! First, this is tremendously insulting; it's not saying "you're wrong", but "I distrust you so much as a human being that I don't even trust that the words coming out of your mouth are…

I was concerned that you might misconstrue my post, and for that I am sorry, I should have made my point clearer.

I am not making aspersions about your motives. I am perfectly willing to believe that you are sincere.

I might even be convinced that the author of the WSJ opinion piece is sincere (I at least lean towards the likelihood that he's probably using evidence like the proverbial drunk uses lampposts, i.e. for support rather than illumination). That does not change the insidiousness of his piece, or your defense of his piece.

I have serious problems with revisionism (the WSJ piece) or efforts to downplay its seriousness (your post).

Re: No Credit for Uncle Sam in creating Net? Vint Cerf disagrees

#50

Post by jessriedel »

newbie12 wrote: post #7

A little funding for basic computer science research is not big government. Bailing out banks and giving private solar companies loans is big government.

More to the point, the government is not horrible at funding basic research (although I think there's a case to be made that it leads to some academic pathologies) and it can occasionally even be good at building basic infrastructure. But this debate is in the context of Federal government spending, and research and infrastructure are only tiny, tiny parts.

US Federal Budget is dominated by 3 things: Defense, Medicare, and Social Security. The research arm of the DoD makes up a pretty small part of the Defense budget, and the last two, Medicare and Social Security, are both (inter-generational) redistribuions. So this whole argument over the internet is really just political stupidity, both for liberals who hold it up as an example of how effective Federal spending can be, and conservatives who want to re-write history.

Post reply on HN