PICKET:(VIDEO) Obama - 'If you’ve got a business -- you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen' - Washington Times: " If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business -- you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet."
'via Blog this'
I think Obama just offended every successful entrepreneur.
First, without knowing much about it, I really doubt government had much to do with the rise of the internet. But lets grant the premise. Does anyone actually believe that the internet would not have come about without the government? Wasn't the internet kind of an obvious idea that was going to happen regardless of whether government was involved?
6 comments:
I think it's pretty well accepted that ARPANET is the most direct ancestor to the internet. That was funded by the DoD, but the motivation for its development was surely not "so that all the companies could make money off the Internet."
CERN is credited, on the other hand, for creating the World Wide Web.
Was there some techonology that ARPANET or CERN created that was not obvious, but was needed for the internet.
The internet seems like kind of an obvious idea to me. One that clearly has a commercial potential and would have happened regardless of any government program.
Pretty hard to way what "would have" happened. Most things seem pretty obvious in hindsight. People argue along similar lines with Einstein saying that Special Relativity was coming down the pipe regardless (in that case, I doubt it).
The fact is that government did play a role. Yeah the internet probably would've come along anyway, but who can say what opportunities that extra time would've cost (I'm pretty sure their involvement expedited things)?
It's hard to prove counterfactuals. I just thought this one seemed kind of easy.
The thing about Einstein's contributions is, at least based on my understanding, they were novel and counter-intuitive. The concept of the internet, in contrast, seems quite obvious. Once you have two computers, it makes sense that you would like them to communicate with each other. But perhaps there was techonolocial limitation that made what0seems-to-me obvious concept hard to execute, and the government had some role in doing that.
Opportunity cost is a big question. But it can cut the other way, too. Who knows how much it cost to run APRANET, and how much return on investment we actually got from the program. And who knows what that money have done if spent or invested privately.
Relativity was definitely a huge conceptual leap (choosing to have the constancy of the speed of light as a fundamental principle from which to derive a theory) where the internet seems more of a technical challenge. Just how big of a challenge it was to link computers in the 60s and 70s I can't say.
Good point on the opportunity cost going both ways, though it can be hard to compare X amount of dollars being left in the private sector versus the same X amount spent to help develop the internet.
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