Columnist: “It’s an urban legend that the government launched the Internet”
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.0164
Back in July 1945, with a world war ending, the Atlantic‘s headnote on its often-recalled article ‘As We May Think’ began, ‘As Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, Dr. Vannevar Bush has coordinated the activities of some six thousand leading American scientists in the application of science to warfare.’ The editor explained that in the article, Bush ‘urges that men of science should ... turn to the massive task of making more accessible our bewildering store of knowledge,’ given that ‘instruments are at hand which, if properly developed, will give man access to and command over the inherited knowledge of the ages.’
Now that those instruments have long since evolved as the Internet and the World Wide Web, the Wall Street Journal columnist L. Gordon Crovitz has asserted a potentially controversial interpretation of the instruments’ origins. His 23 July column carries the headline ‘Who Really Invented the Internet? Contrary to legend, it wasn’t the federal government, and the Internet had nothing to do with maintaining communications during a war.’
In choosing historical framing, Crovitz joins the long-ago Atlantic editor, who closed that headnote this way: ‘Like Emerson’s famous address of 1837 on ‘The American Scholar,’ this paper by Dr. Bush calls for a new relationship between thinking man and the sum of our knowledge.’
Crovitz himself has notable qualifications as a thinking man engaging the Internet-age sum of our knowledge. The WSJ reports that he ‘graduated from the University of Chicago and has law degrees from Wadham College, Oxford University, which he attended as a Rhodes scholar, and Yale Law School,’ that he’s a former publisher of the WSJ, and that he oversaw the growth of WSJ online ‘to more than one million paying subscribers, making WSJ.com the largest paid news site on the Web.’
His column calls President Obama’s recent claim that ‘government research created the Internet’ an ‘urban legend.’ The column merits reading in its entirety, but it can be reported here that he recalls that ‘by the 1960s technologists were trying to connect separate physical communications networks into one global network — a ‘world-wide web.’' Apparently Crovitz means that term in some other sense than historical, given that another quarter-century passed before government-funded physicists at CERN created the web as an overlay on the Internet.
Crovitz does stipulate that the ‘federal government was involved, modestly, via the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency Network,’ but declares that ‘full credit goes to’ Xerox. His closing requires quoting:
As for the government’s role, the Internet was fully privatized in 1995, when a remaining piece of the network run by the National Science Foundation was closed — just as the commercial Web began to boom. Economist Tyler Cowen wrote in 2005: ‘The Internet, in fact, reaffirms the basic free market critique of large government. 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.’
It’s important to understand the history of the Internet because it’s too often wrongly cited to justify big government. It’s also important to recognize that building great technology businesses requires both innovation and the skills to bring innovations to market. As the contrast between Xerox and Apple shows, few business leaders succeed in this challenge. Those who do — not the government — deserve the credit for making it happen.
Addendum concerning ‘one of the most important technological revolutions of the’ millennium: Possibly it was wise of Crovitz never to mention the commonly heard charge that former Vice President Al Gore claimed to have invented the Internet. But maybe it’s nevertheless sensible to mention here that Snopes.com calls that charge false , explaining that Gore never said ‘anything that could reasonably be interpreted that way.’
Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.