Tuesday, November 03, 2009
Who Invented the Internet?

http://distributism.blogspot.com/2009/11/who-invented-internet.html

Capitalists, we'll often hear. Just about any discussion of distributism on the Internet will, at least once, involve the phrase, "I can't believe you're attacking capitalism on the Internet, one of the greatest of capitalism's inventions!" Take, as a typical case, the example of John Clark, from the distributism debates of 2002:


Seeing an attack on capitalism appear on the Internet is like hearing a sermon on the evils of flying from the cockpit at 40,000 feet. Using capitalist tools to spread anti-capitalist thought is a strange irony.


This argument lacks merit in any case; it's like saying that fighting a war against the Chinese using gunpowder is a strange irony. But leaving that aside, is it true? Is the Internet one of the vaunted "capitalist tools," an invention of private enterprise operating unstinted by the interference of evil government?

Before we begin to examine this historically myopic claim, let's define what the Internet actually is. It is not the World Wide Web, which is only a part, albeit a large one, of the Internet. The Internet is, in fact, simply a global network of computers connected via a computer communications protocol called TCP/IP. It operates by a very simple server-client system; the client (like the computer you're reading this on right now) asks the server (where the docuмent resides) for a given file (like this one), and the server responds by sending that file to the client. There are some complications to this description, some of them significant---we haven't even mentioned server-side and client-side scripting, for example---but for our purposes, this description is accurate enough.

Where are the servers for "the Internet"? Everywhere and nowhere. Servers all over the world are responsible for answering clients' requests for various files; requests are sent to the appropriate servers---that is, the ones that actually have the requested files---via a complex system of routing that we don't really need to worry about here.

The Internet has no government. There is no entity that controls the Internet or makes sure that it's working properly. However, there are some organizations that make sure things don't go completely crazy. Various standards organizations ensure that the protocols and languages used on the Internet are standard; that is, conform to a given specification in order to ensure that everyone will know what to expect when they use them. Most importantly, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, is in charge of making sure that names and numbers are kept unique and orderly; its board is made up of members from across the spectrum of private enterprise, voluntary organizations, and academia. The United States federal government is still more or less in charge of ICANN.

Notice that I said "still." I said this because the United States federal government has always been "in charge" of the Internet, insofar as anybody has been (and strictly speaking, nobody is). In other words, insofar as anybody keeps the Internet running, it's the government, not private enterprise. Hardly a capitalist tool. But moving beyond that: who invented the Internet? Is it a creation of capitalist ingenuity, as so many assert?

In its earliest incarnation, the Internet was invented by the United States government's Advanced Research Project Agency, ARPA. In an attempt to ensure that we stayed ahead of the Russians in every field of technical endeavor, the government funded ARPA, which in turn funded a variety of programs, including the one that led to what we now call the Internet. The first connection in this network, originally called the ARPANET, was made on 29 October 1969, between UCLA and the Stanford Research Institute. (You may also hear the ARPANET referred to as the DARPANET, formed from adding the "Defense" to the beginning, which gives you an idea of what it was originally designed for.)

Still no profit motive involved here; this is merely the government funding programs which it deemed useful for itself. ARPANET continued to grow, going international for the first time in 1978. It utilized "IP," or "Internet Protocol," for its communications. This still isn't technically "the Internet," however, because by definition the Internet uses TCP/IP, as we mentioned earlier. However, it's definitely the precursor to the Internet, and as yet private enterprise has had no significant role in its development.

The TCP/IP protocols were developed in the mid-1970s at Stanford University; their specification, RFC-675, was the first time the word "Internet" was used in reference to a global TCP/IP network. In 1983, the entire ARPANET was placed on this protocol. In 1985, the National Science Foundation started its own network, NSFNET, which elected to use the TCP/IP protocols of ARPANET. Already at this time the bedrock of the Internet was in place. People had email and could work on and contact other computers around the world. Once the NSFNET was connected to the ARPANET, the Internet could, for the first time, really be said to exist. And still private enterprise had had no significant role.

Indeed, commercial use of the Internet was strictly forbidden; it wasn't considered appropriate to allow private corporations to profit from a publicly funded international network. Private enterprise wasn't involved in the Internet until 1989, when the commercial MCI Mail was added to the NSFNET. Usenet arose about that time, along with the first of the Internet service providers (ISPs), including the recently defunct Compuserve. But the fact of the matter is that the Internet was conceived and developed entirely by non-profit entities, not by capitalists engaged in private enterprise attempting to make a profit.

Well, what about the World Wide Web, then? Surely that must be credited to capitalism?

No. The World Wide Web is that subset of the Internet which is governed by a weblike system of interlinked pages, largely written in HTML, or HyperText Markup Language. The "hypertext" part refers to what we now mostly call "links," which keep docuмents linked in to one another. HTML and the World Wide Web were developed primarily by one person, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, while working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (the French name of which becomes CERN). CERN is itself a governmental laboratory with many member states contributing to it; this development, too, cannot be credited to capitalism.

Nor was the popularization of the World Wide Web a capitalist phenomenon. The Internet, already widely used by academia, governments, and to a lesser extent hobbyists, was accessed through a number of different means prior to the development of the World Wide Web. Computer old-timers (and even not-so-old-timers like myself) will remember the old gopher system (also developed by a public organization, the University of Minnesota), along with many others. The Web, however, with its hypertext system, made all of this much easier and more manageable. But it needed a browser, capable of displaying and following hypertext links, in order to function properly. The Internet therefore really took off among hobbyists and other private systems with the development of the Mosaic web browser---another creation of a government entity, this time the University of Illinois. Its development was funded by the High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991, sponsored by Al Gore. (Incidentally, sponsoring this act was the source of his infamous comment about taking "the initiative in creating the Internet," which is hyperbole at the very best.) None of this is even remotely capitalism at work; as late as 1993, when Mosaic was released, private enterprise had still had little role in the development of the Internet at all, much less a significant enough role to justify calling it a "tool of capitalism."

Only at this point did private industry begin to get involved, and even then governments and voluntary, non-profit agencies continue to play an enormous role. Indeed, such non-profit organizations govern the Internet. Standards organizations like W3C and ISO make sure that the protocols, languages, and other structures at use on the Internet are well-defined and universally accepted. The United States government plays a large role to this day in ensuring the orderly operation of the Internet as a whole. All in all, this can hardly be counted a great triumph of capitalism.

Indeed, capitalism didn't create the Internet, nor did capitailsm perfect it. Capitalism swept down on a fully formed and fully functional Internet, developed and supported by the efforts and money of the community as a whole, and turned it to their own personal profit. While utilizing the work of others to benefit oneself is perfectly acceptable at times, it's the height of vanity to them appropriate that work as one's own and call it one's own tool.

Now, of course, large portions of the Internet are commercial, large portions are government, and large portions are neither, which is really as it should be. But the Internet certainly wasn't created by these commercial interests; it wasn't popularized by these commercial interests; it wasn't perfected by these commercial interests; and it's not maintained by these commercial interests. All of these things were done by governments and government-funded organizations, supposedly the antithesis of all free enterprise.

Does it still seem incongruous to use the Internet to argue against capitalism?

Praise be to Christ the King!



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