The point about taxes is important. When a company like Google makes a lot of money, a lot of taxation occurs. This allows the government to essentially capture

The point about taxes is important. When a company like Google makes a lot of money, a lot of taxation occurs. This allows the government to essentially capture an ROI on that research. Given current "financial technology," government is indeed the only entity that can make R&D investments that are both high-risk and broad-payoff -- broad-payoff meaning that they pay off unpredictably and often across the entire economy. ROI is captured through economy-wide growth via taxation. Only governments can do this because there is currently no private financial instrument that can securitize that kind of investment or capture its upside. Is/was the public research that led to PageRank patented? If that were the case, it's the only thing I would disagree with. Public research should not be patented, or if it is it should be made available to all domestic (US tax paying) companies and individuals royalty-free. It'd be appropriate to charge foreign licensees fees, as they are not paying into the US R&D fund, but the impracticality of that makes such a national patent licensing scheme kind of dubious. Edit: yes -- so my comments above should be tempered by this: https://encrypted.google.com/patents/US6285999 https://encrypted.google.com/patents/US6285999