Fans of tax-funded investment often cite the Internet as an example of the good that government can do. Sure, they say, the Net now has uncountable mi

Does the Internet Prove the Need for Government Investment?

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2021-06-04 18:00:04

Fans of tax-funded investment often cite the Internet as an example of the good that government can do. Sure, they say, the Net now has uncountable millions of components, from Web sites to computer networks large and small. But if it hadn’t been for those first critical investments by the government, we wouldn’t have the Internet today. Politicians from Vice President Al Gore to Speaker Newt Gingrich now call for more such investments by the government—and the taxes to fund them. We must find and identify promising new technologies and invest in them to build tomorrow’s information infrastructure, they tell us, a task too important to be left to private enterprise.

The actual history of the Internet suggests that this is far from accurate. The Internet today bears little resemblance either to what the government wanted to build or to what it actually built. The innovations in networking that produced today’s Net occurred as much despite government funding as because of it. If anything, therefore, the Internet represents the success of spontaneous ordering over central planning, not the successful design of a new technology by the state.

Examining the strength of the statist claim that government investment created the Internet requires thinking carefully about exactly what the Internet is. In a 1968 paper titled “The Computer as a Communication Device,” two pioneering computer scientists, J.S.R. Licklider and Robert Taylor, set out the principles that continue to define the Internet today. According to Michael and Ronda Hauben, the principles consist of these ideas: “1. Communication is defined as an interactive creative process. 2. Response times need to be short to make the ‘conversation’ free and easy. 3. Larger networks form out of smaller regional networks. 4. Communities form out of affinity and common interests.”1 Perhaps most striking about this definition is its similarity to the description of an open society built around free markets.