The Information Byway

After more than a year and a half in which to search for rationalizations, a few tech gurus and journalists have come to Al Gore's rescue. Apparently, when Gore said during a March 1999 CNN interview that he "took the initiative in creating the Internet," he didn't really mean it. A couple of the Internet's actual founding fathers, Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn, released a statement in late September that said, in part, "We don't think, as some people have argued, that Gore intended to claim he "invented" the Internet. Moreover, there is no question in our minds that while serving as Senator, Gore's initiatives had a significant and beneficial effect on the still-evolving Internet. The fact of the matter is that Gore was talking about and promoting the Internet long before most people were listening." Even if one accepts their view that Gore didn't intend to take credit for inventing the Net, the episode offers a good example of a politician drastically inflating his own importance for political gain. After all, the Internet's precursor, ARPANET, was commissioned by the Defense Department close to a decade before Gore was first elected to office, and today's decentralized commercial Internet is a pretty far cry from anything helped along by Gore's cheerleading efforts.

There's an even more dangerous undertone in Cerf's and Kahn's strategic extrication, however, made explicit in Scott Rosenberg's Oct. 5 column in Salon — the idea that technological advances like the Internet are only possible with government assistance. Rosenberg writes, "The Internet didn't spring full-blown out of some scientists' heads, nor did it just grow like some techno-Topsy powered by the mysterious magic of the marketplace. It emerged from the world of government-subsidized university research, and every step of the way along its passage from academic network to global information infrastructure was shepherded by the state." There's certainly no denying this. Rosenberg thinks that "Libertarians and conservatives are uncomfortable admitting this," but I can't imagine why. Admitting that the Internet as we know it today would not exist without government's heavy hand isn't much different than admitting that our highways and telephone lines are products of government programs.

But just because the development of the Internet included a large dose of government, there's no reason to suppose that government involvement was the only possible means to reach the end we have today, or even that it was the best means.

It's not too hard to envision an alternate history in which government stayed out of tech research — one in which private universities decided it would be beneficial to build a network that would allow them to easily share resources and research. A world where businesses piggybacked onto the system much sooner, and where private letter-carrying firms realized the commercial potential of this new form of communication long before the sluggish U.S. Postal Service.

And even those who are intent on seeing government's involvement as a benevolent presence have to recognize that the things most people know and love about the Internet today aren't a product of infrastructure itself, but the choices and interaction of countless individuals who use, abuse and test the limits of this new toy, creating a beautiful mess of spontaneous order. The fact that the foundations the government laid are being used in ways that it never intended or imagined is what makes the Net what it is. Human ingenuity will eventually break through the limits of any artificial protocols.

In the end, it doesn't matter that the government funded most of the Internet's early developments. It matters even less that Al Gore spearheaded a few pieces of tech-friendly legislation and did a few splits and high-kicks on the sidelines. There's no reason to be thankful for the government's technological largesse. Indeed, government action probably short-circuited a much quicker, cheaper and more efficient route to cyberspace. It's one more chapter in the neverending story of government intervention — whenever something good happens, government partisans like to pretend it couldn't possibly have occurred without Big Brother's help. —Eric D. Dixon

(Printed in Liberty, December 2000 issue.)