I mean “sexify” in the sense of “make marketable” or “desirable”–“sexy,” to use the parlance of our times. I am specifically referring to the internet. Al Gore did not invent the internet, and he never claimed he did. It was actually a decades-spanning effort of government agencies and private companies with government contracts, gradually building computers and networks that could eventually integrate to create a truly decentralized, global system.
Partial map of the Internet based on the January 15, 2005 data found on opte.org. Each line is drawn between two nodes, representing two IP addresses. The length of the lines are indicative of the delay between those two nodes. This graph represents less than 30% of the Class C networks reachable by the data collection program in early 2005. Lines are color-coded according to their corresponding RFC 1918 allocation as follows:
Dark blue: net, ca, us
Green: com, org
Red: mil, gov, edu
Yellow: jp, cn, tw, au, de
Magenta: uk, it, pl, fr
Gold: br, kr, nl
White: unknown
In 1960, an engineer named Paul Baran came up with the idea of a packet-switching network. Baran was working for the RAND Corporation, a government-funded think tank, and he’d been looking for ways to create networks that would survive a disaster. Baran saw that the country’s most basic communications infrastructure—especially the telephone network maintained by AT&T—had several central points of failure. If you took out these central machines, the entire network would fail. His insight was to create a decentralized network, one in which every point was connected to every other point in multiple ways—your message from New York to San Francisco would get split into packets and might pass through Chicago, New Orleans, Atlanta, Tampa, or St. Louis. If one of those nodes were taken out, most of your message would get through, and the network would still survive.
As recounted in Where Wizards Stay Up Late, when Baran presented this idea to AT&T, the company’s engineers thought he was nuts. They argued that he had no idea how to run a communications system, and they fiercely resisted the idea of creating a packet-switching network. And that’s why the task fell to the federal government—the Defense Department had to create the Internet because private enterprise refused to.
Decades later, it’s easy to blame AT&T for being short-sighted. At the time, though, the company’s decision seemed perfectly reasonable. Baran was proposing something completely radical—who in his right mind would route a message from New York to San Francisco through so many different paths? And why make such a huge change when AT&T’s old way worked so well for its own aims (that is, building a profitable business)?
In other words, creating something as grand and untested as the Internet was something that a private company simply couldn’t do. The project was too big, and the payoff too uncertain. That’s true of most technologies in their infancy. The Army created ENIAC, the world’s first general-purpose computer—and only after the military proved the basic idea was sound did IBM jump into the business. Apple began working on a multitouch interface in the 2000s, but that was only after decades of research at other labs, including by many researchers funded by the government. The American military developed and launched the network of satellites that form the Global Positioning System—and only then could tech companies come along to make spectacular use of that system.
The private sector took these creations and made us want to use them. The GPS system, by itself, did not do much for the average citizen, at least until TomTom, Garmin, and Google Maps came along. Any internet entrepreneur working today, however much blood, sweat, tears, and gumption may go into their creation, is standing on the shoulders of Big Government. Just accept that fact and move on.
This is not to say that government doesn’t make epic mistakes, or that government bureaucrats, in specific situations, may stymie a particular impulse of a particular entrepreneur. The private sector does the same–ask anyone who has money in a bank. Government may seem cumbersome, monolithic, immobile, and wasteful, and it often is. There are some seriously kick-ass babies in there among that bathwater, though, and we need to help them grow.
In these days of lambasting anything and everything government does, we tend to overlook that, for the most part, our cars did not explode this morning (thank you, National Highway Transportation Safety Administration!) and our breakfast cereal did not contain actual pebbles (not sure whom to thank for that). The fact that we are all typing and/or reading this on the internet is a testament to government doing something right, doing something the private sector couldn’t (or wouldn’t, or shouldn’t) do, and then letting the private sector roll with it. Yes, I have engaged in hyperbole (on an epic scale, I’d like to think) in this post, but much of the rhetoric these days is also hyperbolic. I’m bringing hyperbole to a hyperbole fight.
Photo credit: “Internet map 1024” by The Opte Project [CC-BY-2.5], via Wikimedia Commons.
