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Do you understand that "the government" funded the internet in the first place? Mandating standards is one of the things that a government should do. The Korea

Do you understand that "the government" funded the internet in the first place? Mandating standards is one of the things that a government should do. The Korean government did a job with downsides in this case, but given that the decision was taken in the nineties, it was not that bad. At the time, the US government had embargoed all the cryptography with keys that had more than 40 bits. What Koreans attempted was to workaround this limitation.

SagelyGuru 14y ago
Most relevant to this discussion is www and that came out as a side effect of physics research at CERN, so it can hardly be described as an intensional government funded program. The US government's ARPANET plans prior to www never envisaged letting every Tom Dick and Harry do their banking (or anything) online. Even at the time of the embargo, there was PGP and it worked just fine. The problem was, and is, the close relationship between the bankers (and other monopolists) and the government(s), whereby the public is forced to use what they mandate, rather than the other way round. In a different world, it would not be technically difficult for people to download an open source application a la GPG, generate and keep their own private keys, and the governments, banks, and software monopolists working with it, rather than against it. The banks could look up their customers' public keys to establish secure communications and the big software producers could make it easier to use. All it needs is some goodwill, sadly lacking as it weakens centralised control.
- aurelianito 14y ago
  I think that the problem was that nobody had experience with online banking the last millennium. The sad thing is that Koreans kept the system after they knew that it was a really bad idea, instead of evolving it into something better. Do I think that it would have been better if no government intervention had occurred? I have no reason to believe that.

SagelyGuru 14y ago

Most relevant to this discussion is www and that came out as a side effect of physics research at CERN, so it can hardly be described as an intensional government funded program. The US government's ARPANET plans prior to www never envisaged letting every Tom Dick and Harry do their banking (or anything) online. Even at the time of the embargo, there was PGP and it worked just fine. The problem was, and is, the close relationship between the bankers (and other monopolists) and the government(s), whereby the public is forced to use what they mandate, rather than the other way round. In a different world, it would not be technically difficult for people to download an open source application a la GPG, generate and keep their own private keys, and the governments, banks, and software monopolists working with it, rather than against it. The banks could look up their customers' public keys to establish secure communications and the big software producers could make it easier to use. All it needs is some goodwill, sadly lacking as it weakens centralised control.

aurelianito 14y ago
I think that the problem was that nobody had experience with online banking the last millennium. The sad thing is that Koreans kept the system after they knew that it was a really bad idea, instead of evolving it into something better. Do I think that it would have been better if no government intervention had occurred? I have no reason to believe that.