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> 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 entrep

> 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.