If so, I don't think that really applies to what the article is talking about. The article is talking about Alphabet potentially using large amounts of data from other researchers, mostly academic, who were funded by the government and commercializing it. That's more akin to how it was before Bayh-Dole: a private company taking government funded research they were not involved in, adding their own privately funded research, and making something commercial.
This means, for example, that David Baker licenses Rosetta for free to academic and government, but commercial users have to obtain a paid commercial license. Baker (his lab, or LLC, or whomever vends Rosetta Commercial) benefits monetarialy from all the data that Rosetta includes, which is decades of structural biology funded by NIH and others.
My comment was in reply to this comment by MauranKilom:
> > Maybe I have a wrong conception of what research is supposed to achieve, but commercializing new insights is absolutely one of the intended outcomes. One would sure hope that taxpayer money isn't funneled into research to... just enable more research.
And further on your comment:
> The article is talking about Alphabet [commercializing results from public datasets without needing to pay for them] That's more akin to how it was before Bayh-Dole:
Indeed, pre Bayh-Dole, publicly funded research was public (consider it public domain, or at least "MIT licensed") and anyone could use it.
Now everything has to be licensed from university licensing departments, typically with an expensive exclusive. Which has had a distorting effect on research, not merely restricting use (have you ever tried to work with a university licensing office? They consider even the most trivial results to be Nobel prize class) but, because they are a source of revenue, bending resource allocation, tenure, etc much as sports teams do for the schools that have them.
I don't think federal funding of research is that much older in the US, only really starting in the 50s apart from military research. How exactly were the early QM researchers funded anyway? (apart from Einstein's famous day job at the patent office). I know at least a few of them had fellowships at universities, meaning rich benefactors.
US government support for university research dates back to patent holder Abraham Lincoln who even in the middle of a war got legislation passed to support land grant (mostly ag) colleges and universities (and of which MIT was one of the very early beneficiaries). However it was small and you are right that in WWII the model of the US modern research university was explicitly created by James Conant, with MIT again being the largest beneficiary (note that all tuition and student expenses are about 14% of MIT's revenue and 16% of expenditures, and the number of staff is greater than that of the student body -- it's a huge government research lab with a small school attached).
The problem with this model is that unless you are MIT (/Stanford/Harvard/Cornell/CMU et al -- maybe 25 institutions, if that) licensing revenue matters, and affects who gets tenure, departmental budgets etc.
> How exactly were the early QM researchers funded anyway? (apart from Einstein's famous day job at the patent office). I know at least a few of them had fellowships at universities, meaning rich benefactors.
In Europe, in the 20th century funding came primarily from governments (and benefactors, more early in the century), under varying institutions (the big research institutions in Imperial and post-WWI Germany, "Institutes" in France, Oxbridge in the UK, etc). In The USA it was the institutions themselves, some benefactors and, as I said, some government funding (like Fermi and Lawrence).
This is a recent idea, dating back to the late 70s and implemented through the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act. Before that research was research; development (and private research of course) was the province of business.
The Gradgrind mentality that all research must be commercialized has impoverished basic research; of what use is looking for gravity waves or new branches of mathematics (just look at the contortions university press offices go to to justify some new paper on quantum mechanics).
Speaking of which, QM is a perfect example of something that would have advanced very slowly had this attitude existed 150 years ago…yet it is at the heart of the semiconductor revolution!