"Gordon Crovitz: Who Really Invented the Internet?"

From the WSJ:

. . . It's an urban legend that the government launched the Internet. The myth is that the Pentagon created the Internet to keep its communications lines up even in a nuclear strike. The truth is a more interesting story about how innovation happens—and about how hard it is to build successful technology companies even once the government gets out of the way.
For many technologists, the idea of the Internet traces to Vannevar Bush, the presidential science adviser during World War II who oversaw the development of radar and the Manhattan Project. In a 1946 article in The Atlantic titled "As We May Think," Bush defined an ambitious peacetime goal for technologists: Build what he called a "memex" through which "wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified."
That fired imaginations, and by the 1960s technologists were trying to connect separate physical communications networks into one global network—a "world-wide web." The federal government was involved, modestly, via the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency Network. Its goal was not maintaining communications during a nuclear attack, and it didn't build the Internet. Robert Taylor, who ran the ARPA program in the 1960s, sent an email to fellow technologists in 2004 setting the record straight: "The creation of the Arpanet was not motivated by considerations of war. The Arpanet was not an Internet. An Internet is a connection between two or more computer networks."
If the government didn't invent the Internet, who did? Vinton Cerf developed the TCP/IP protocol, the Internet's backbone, and Tim Berners-Lee gets credit for hyperlinks.
But full credit goes to the company where Mr. Taylor worked after leaving ARPA: Xerox. . . .

Just a reminder why this is important.  Obama claimed (July 13, 2012):

They know they didn’t -- look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own.  You didn’t get there on your own.  I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart.  There are a lot of smart people out there.  It must be because I worked harder than everybody else.  Let me tell you something -- there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there.  (Applause.)
     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. . . . 

UPDATE: Some letters to the editor in response to this piece can be found here.

"Washington Is Annoyed at Wall Street's Failure to Panic"

Politicians in Washington are upset that financial markets aren't panicking. Possibly the politicians might realize that the markets aren't upset because they don't believe all the scare stories politicians use to worry many voters. From CNBC:

I just got off the phone with a source on Capitol Hill who has spent the past few days trying to convince Republicans to vote for a debt ceiling hike.

He told me that the biggest obstacle he faces has been "market complacency."

"Frankly, a bit of panic would be very helpful right now," he said.

As he explained it, lots of people in Washington, D.C. expected that this would be a week marked by panic in the markets. Stocks would tank. Bonds would get clobbered. The dollar would do something dramatic. And all of this would help convince reluctant lawmakers that they had to reach a compromise on the debt ceiling. . . .

Instead, the market has just been on a quiet, non-panicked slide.

Stocks have sold off by a couple of percentage points, but nothing that indicates a real fear trade in the works.

Everyone in D.C. has a theory about this. Some believe the market is sending a message that a deal will get done. Others think the market doesn't understand politics. . . .

Politicians might not want to believe it, but there is a third option. Politicians don't know what they are doing.

More on this belief that financial markets think that it is so crucial that a deal be made.

Republicans are losing support from some of their strongest backers and concede there must be some answers before financial markets open Monday, one day before threatened default. . . .

Market Failure: Supposedly not enough diversity

This brings us back to Nike's new shoe. Foot Locker is full of options that fit me and most other Americans. But American Indians make up just 1.5 percent of the U.S. population, and with feet on average three sizes wider, they need different-sized shoes. If we had all voted in a national election on whether the Ministry of Shoes should make wide or typical-width shoes, we surely would have chosen the latter. That's why Friedman condemned government allocation. And yet the market made the same choice. If Nike's announcement looks like a solution to this problem of ignored minority preference, it really isn't. The company took too many years to bring the shoe on line, and according to the Associated Press, the new sneaker "represents less of a financial opportunity than a goodwill and branding effort." . . . .

1) Just because Nike wasn't producing these shoes, I would have liked some evidence that shoes weren't already being produced for this segment of the market. I looked up some shoes on the internet and it seemed that this market niche was well covered see here, here, and here. You get sizes from EEEEEE to XW, and I haven't even heard of some of these sizes since they are so wide. I see no evidence that the basic claim in this article is correct.

2) "That's why Friedman condemned government allocation. And yet the market made the same choice." If the size of the particular group is so small or if those in the group aren't willing to pay that much for the shoes, you might not get a product specifically designed for each small group, but it is a long way to implying that the market doesn't produce a lot more diversity of products than the government.

3) "The company took too many years to bring the shoe on line . . . ." There is a cost and benefit from producing this diversity of products. I would guess that the benefits now exceed the costs. Possibly the cost of making products for such small niches has gone down. The article mentions that these wider feet might be a result of "diabetes and related conditions" and possibly more people generally are suffering from this problem. (It isn't clear from the piece what percentage of the 1.5 percent of the population who are Indians have these wide feet, but presumably it is less than 1.5 percent.) Bottom line: what evidence is provided here that it took "too many years" to provide these shoes. That is, "too many years" in the sense that the costs of doing this were less than the benefits (total costs including the costs of figuring out that such a market existed) and yet it was not provided.