> The defense industry is why the internet exists. The defense industry throws money at anything that seems to suit its needs. Thus, claiming that without the

> The defense industry is why the internet exists. The defense industry throws money at anything that seems to suit its needs. Thus, claiming that without the defense industry we would never have the Internet is not clear to me. I am familiar with disproving negatives, but I don't find it to be a compelling claim that the scientists involved would never have developed the Internet. For example, was the mother of all demos exclusively the result of actions from the DoD? The innovative scientists and engineers at Xerox PARC? Many of the people involved in these things likely already theorized on how to build this sort of stuff, and sought out the easiest route. But the DoD comes with substantial amounts of other costs. For example, the Vietnam war is largely understood to have been initiated by people within the DoD complex and not the actions of foreign governments. During the war, the DoD cronies forced soldiers to use a defective assault rifle that would leave entire platoons with nothing but grenades and handguns to get slaughtered. Agent Orange killed and continues to kill an incredible number of civilians in Vietnam. On balance, the DoD leads to horrific amounts of death and destruction using engineers who may otherwise create things that would make people's lives better. Further, significant innovations such as the Internet would most likely still have been developed, just by some private entity or group of entities where the scientist and engineers would have gone to work.