Question

should the internet be a public good?

write a 2 page answer

Answer 1

Silicon Valley often likes to pretend that innovation is the result of entrepreneurs tinkering in garages. But most of the innovation on which Silicon Valley depends comes from government research, for the simple reason that the public sector can afford to take risks that the private sector can’t.It’s precisely the insulation from market forces that enables government to finance the long-term scientific labor that ends up producing many of the most profitable inventions.This is particularly true of the Internet. The Internet was such a radical and unlikely idea that only decades of public funding and planning could bring it into existence. Not only did the basic technology have to be invented, but the infrastructure had to be built, specialists had to be trained, and contractors had to be staffed, funded, and in some cases, directly spun off from government agencies.

The Internet is sometimes compared to the interstate highway system, another major public project. But as the legal activist Nathan Newman points out, the comparison only makes sense if the government “had first imagined the possibility of cars, subsidized the invention of the auto industry, funded the technology of concrete and tar, and built the whole initial system.”The Cold War provided the pretext for this ambitious undertaking. Nothing loosened the purse strings of American politicians quite like the fear of falling behind the Soviet Union. This fear spiked sharply in 1957, when the Soviets put the first satellite into space. The Sputnik launch produced a genuine sense of crisis in the American establishment, and led to a substantial increase in federal research funding.

One consequence was the creation of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), which would later change its name to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).ARPA became the R&D arm of the Defense Department. Instead of centralizing research in government labs, ARPA took a more distributed approach, cultivating a community of contractors from both academia and the private sector.

In the early 1960s, ARPA began investing heavily in computing, building big mainframes at universities and other research sites. But even for an agency as generously funded as ARPA, this spending spree wasn’t sustainable. In those days, a computer cost hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars. So ARPA came up with a way to share its computing resources more efficiently among its contractors: it built a network.This network was ARPANET, and it laid the foundation for the Internet. ARPANET linked computers through an experimental technology called packet-switching, which involved breaking messages down into small chunks called “packets,” routing them through a maze of switches, and reassembling them on the other end.

Today, this is the mechanism that moves data across the Internet, but at the time, the telecom industry considered it absurdly impractical. Years earlier, the Air Force had tried to persuade AT&T to build such a network, without success. ARPA even offered ARPANET to AT&T after it was up and running, preferring to buy time on the network instead of managing it themselves.Given the chance to acquire the most sophisticated computer network in the world, AT&T refused. The executives simply couldn’t see the money in it.Their shortsightedness was fortunate for the rest of us. Under public management, ARPANET flourished. Government control gave the network two major advantages.

The first was money: ARPA could pour cash into the system without having to worry about profitability. The agency commissioned pioneering research from the country’s most talented computer scientists at a scale that would’ve been suicidal for a private corporation.And, just as crucially, ARPA enforced an open-source ethic that encouraged collaboration and experimentation. The contractors who contributed to ARPANET had to share the source code of their creations, or risk losing their contracts. This catalyzed scientific creativity, as researchers from a range of different institutions could refine and expand on each other’s work without living in fear of intellectual property law.

The most important innovation that resulted was the Internet protocols, which first emerged in the mid 1970s. These protocols made it possible for ARPANET to evolve into the Internet, by providing a common language that let very different networks talk to one another.The open and nonproprietary nature of the Internet greatly enhanced its usefulness. It promised a single interoperable standard for digital communication: a universal medium, rather than a patchwork of incompatible commercial dialects.Promoted by ARPA and embraced by researchers, the Internet grew quickly. Its popularity soon led scientists from outside the military and ARPA’s select circle of contractors to demand access.

In response, the National Science Foundation (NSF) undertook a series of initiatives aimed at bringing the Internet to nearly every university in the country. These culminated in NSFNET, a national network that became the new “backbone” of the Internet.The backbone was a collection of cables and computers that formed the Internet’s main artery. It resembled a river: data flowed from one end to another, feeding tributaries, which themselves branched into smaller and smaller streams.These streams served individual users, who never touched the backbone directly. If they sent data to another part of the Internet, it would travel up the chain of tributaries to the backbone, then down another chain, until it reached the stream that served the recipient.

One lesson of this model is that the Internet needs lots of networks at its edges. The river is useless without tributaries that extend its reach. Which is why the NSF, to ensure the broadest possible connectivity, also subsidized a number of regional networks that linked universities and other participating institutions to the NSFNET backbone.