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> "No reflection on this topic can fail to credit the market economy for what has happened to us. Despite every attempt by governments to hobble it, the digital

by hxa7241 17y ago

> "No reflection on this topic can fail to credit the market economy for what has happened to us. Despite every attempt by governments to hobble it, the digital universe as we know it was made by the market economy. It is a market-built world, which is to say, a world built by human choices, entrepreneurship, and service one to another." The internet and the web were mostly built by government research projects -- as everyone knows. When someone seems to be so carefully and tendentiously writing that out of history, they start sounding like a nutty ideologue. It makes a disappointing end to the piece.

kiba 17y ago
Google, Amazon, Firefox, and Linux? Much of what we use today is maintained by private institutions, non-profit or not. Government may have built the technology, but it is the entrepreneurs that realize the benefits of the internet. On the flip side of government inventions, we don't know what will happen if the government have not funded the creation of the internet. It's the unseen of history that will forever elude us. I believe that academia, with their interest in information technology, would have invented the internet in one form or another. An example of what could have been: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/17/science/17mund.html?_r=2&th&emc=th&oref=slogin http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/17/science/17mund.html?_r=2&#... Addeinum: http://mises.org/daily/2211 http://mises.org/daily/2211 This mises.org article explain my view far better than I could.
- cabalamat 17y ago
  > Much of what we use today is maintained by private institutions, non-profit or not. Agreed. > Government may have built the technology, but it is the entrepreneurs that realize the benefits of the internet. Agreed. Both the public sector and the private sector played an important part. Entrepreneurs built on the foundations provided by DARPA (tcp/ip internetworking) and CERN (http and html), and we're all the better for it. > On the flip side of government inventions, we don't know what will happen if the government have not funded the creation of the internet. What we do know is the walled garden approach of private sector companies at the time, such as Compuserve. We also know that Tim Berners-Lee tried to get private sector hypertext vendors interested in the WWW, but none were interested.
  - kiba 17y ago
    What we do know is the walled garden approach of private sector companies at the time, such as Compuserve. We also know that Tim Berners-Lee tried to get private sector hypertext vendors interested in the WWW, but none were interested. The unknown are far more important than what we do know. It is the unknown that blind us rather than the known. A library with lot of unread books are far more valuable than a library filled with books you already know and read. What you have demonstrate is just one scenerio amongst many, with some unwritten assumptions built-in. To think that you know enough the operational mechanism of history to predict alternative path of history is hurbis. Anybody can come up with reasons for past events, because we have hindsight. However, it takes real talent to be able to predict the trends of history.
- hxa7241 17y ago
  That other mises article also couldn't help ending with: > "In other words, government involvement accounts for the internet's continuing problems, while the market should get the credit for its glories." It is a, rather juvenile seeming, monomania -- that is quite off-putting. Government, or some cooperative superstructure, has a place, as does some kind of market. Although it seems to me that the internet and its goodness exemplifies cooperation more than market, and I expect many others would agree.
  - kiba 17y ago
    There's far more to a libertarian than just free markets. They're all for (peaceful) voluntarism of any kind.
pavlov 17y ago
Indeed. If the market economy had had its way in the early 1990s, we wouldn't have open access and HTML, but islands of walled garden networks (MSN, AOL, Apple eWorld) running closed binaries. (That scenario would probably resemble the mobile phone market quite a bit. "Sign up for MSN, get a free Dell PC and 2000 free online minutes! * Incoming email messages now just $0.03 each + $0.99/megabyte for attachments.")
- kiba 17y ago
  I was under the impression that the world wide web eventually force the walled gardens ISPs to connect to the rest of the internet. However, I could not found details to support or disprove what I said regarding this matter. All I could get from my useless google searches is this ancient 2005 thread and it was about AOL connecting to IRC and usenet(in the second post): http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum10/7630.htm http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum10/7630.htm

by hxa7241 17y ago

kiba 17y ago

Google, Amazon, Firefox, and Linux? Much of what we use today is maintained by private institutions, non-profit or not. Government may have built the technology, but it is the entrepreneurs that realize the benefits of the internet. On the flip side of government inventions, we don't know what will happen if the government have not funded the creation of the internet. It's the unseen of history that will forever elude us. I believe that academia, with their interest in information technology, would have invented the internet in one form or another. An example of what could have been: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/17/science/17mund.html?_r=2&th&emc=th&oref=slogin http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/17/science/17mund.html?_r=2&#... Addeinum: http://mises.org/daily/2211 http://mises.org/daily/2211 This mises.org article explain my view far better than I could.

cabalamat 17y ago
> Much of what we use today is maintained by private institutions, non-profit or not. Agreed. > Government may have built the technology, but it is the entrepreneurs that realize the benefits of the internet. Agreed. Both the public sector and the private sector played an important part. Entrepreneurs built on the foundations provided by DARPA (tcp/ip internetworking) and CERN (http and html), and we're all the better for it. > On the flip side of government inventions, we don't know what will happen if the government have not funded the creation of the internet. What we do know is the walled garden approach of private sector companies at the time, such as Compuserve. We also know that Tim Berners-Lee tried to get private sector hypertext vendors interested in the WWW, but none were interested.
- kiba 17y ago
  What we do know is the walled garden approach of private sector companies at the time, such as Compuserve. We also know that Tim Berners-Lee tried to get private sector hypertext vendors interested in the WWW, but none were interested. The unknown are far more important than what we do know. It is the unknown that blind us rather than the known. A library with lot of unread books are far more valuable than a library filled with books you already know and read. What you have demonstrate is just one scenerio amongst many, with some unwritten assumptions built-in. To think that you know enough the operational mechanism of history to predict alternative path of history is hurbis. Anybody can come up with reasons for past events, because we have hindsight. However, it takes real talent to be able to predict the trends of history.
hxa7241 17y ago
That other mises article also couldn't help ending with: > "In other words, government involvement accounts for the internet's continuing problems, while the market should get the credit for its glories." It is a, rather juvenile seeming, monomania -- that is quite off-putting. Government, or some cooperative superstructure, has a place, as does some kind of market. Although it seems to me that the internet and its goodness exemplifies cooperation more than market, and I expect many others would agree.
- kiba 17y ago
  There's far more to a libertarian than just free markets. They're all for (peaceful) voluntarism of any kind.

pavlov 17y ago

Indeed. If the market economy had had its way in the early 1990s, we wouldn't have open access and HTML, but islands of walled garden networks (MSN, AOL, Apple eWorld) running closed binaries. (That scenario would probably resemble the mobile phone market quite a bit. "Sign up for MSN, get a free Dell PC and 2000 free online minutes! * Incoming email messages now just $0.03 each + $0.99/megabyte for attachments.")

kiba 17y ago
I was under the impression that the world wide web eventually force the walled gardens ISPs to connect to the rest of the internet. However, I could not found details to support or disprove what I said regarding this matter. All I could get from my useless google searches is this ancient 2005 thread and it was about AOL connecting to IRC and usenet(in the second post): http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum10/7630.htm http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum10/7630.htm