3 ms·
The failure of private firms to account for network externalities is one of the classic examples of coordination failure. So yes, the fact that the US governmen
by hyperbovine 17y ago
The failure of private firms to account for network externalities is one of the classic examples of coordination failure. So yes, the fact that the US government stepped in and built ARPAnet probably accelerated the emergence of what you and I call the internet by a decade or more.
I agree that private innovation almost always outpaces public innovation. But it took massive government to get the ball rolling in the first place. You need to keep this in mind next time you make silly overgeneralizations like "all subsidies are bad."
- maxharris 17y agoYou need to substantiate your claim that ARPAnet accelerated the internet by a decade. Why didn't we see ARPAnet get huge in the early 1980s? The real bottleneck to internet adoption was the lack of computing power (memory and CPU), which were necessary for the rise of graphical interfaces, which were necessary for lots of people to be able to use computers. These things were developed rapidly, and privately. The limits that were pushed to do this were not government edicts, but physical constraints (heat dissipation, die shrinks.) Remember that Xerox PARC was a private research lab! The "lead" you're talking about sat idle for twenty years until cheap computers got good enough to help normal people. Therefore that "lead" was essentially wasted according to any sensible economic theory. (I think that ARPAnet was technically great, and TCP/IP, sockets, Unix, etc., are all fine technologies. All I'm saying is that we're at no loss economically if technological development is paid for in a moral way, rather than the way we do it now.)
- infinite8s 17y agosubsidies != research funding