> The only way that something like the Internet could have been created is if a 'third party' of industry created it That's not a justified conclusion. If gov

> The only way that something like the Internet could have been created is if a 'third party' of industry created it That's not a justified conclusion. If government academics had created airplanes or the internal combusition engine, people would say that was the only way they could have come about. > Also, do you realize that most of the basics and rise of computer science comes out of academia? A lot of the basics of computer science really did come from IBM. > If a Google or Microsoft could have patiented basic computer tech, they would have, stunting the growth of the field for 50 years or so. Patent laws are a government creation, so they're the same basic kind of thing academia is. They are not a fundamental fact about the way human societies and economies work. So we can't take that for granted and then use it as a premise to argue against something else. (I acutally do support certain kinds of patents, though, and the effect of patents is usually the exact opposite of what you say here.)