Re:Obama expected to issue cybersecurity executive order
by timsally on Tuesday February 12, 2013 @04:21PM
(#5209628)
The record contradicts what you are saying here; what you've written is almost a perfect inversion of historical fact. All the commercial networks being developed or deployed when the Internet was being invented were circuit switched, centralized networks. They really didn't have anything to do with the Internet at all. The design philosophy behind the Internet [1, Section 3] was drastically different than all commercial efforts at the time. The design was so different and so unique compared to existing work that the inventors won a Turing Award for it.
As an aside, all of the above is typically covered in the first week or two of a networking course (I like Brighten Godfrey's [2]).
[1] http://ccr.sigcomm.org/archive/1995/jan95/ccr-9501-clark.pdf
The technology that made the Internet possible was almost exclusively private sector technology. The desire, effort and vision to put together large networks was already in place by the time the government made their move.
The government helped, no question about it, but all the pieces were already there to make it happen. The private sector was driving that direction and would have built out very large networks regardless of the government.