I wholly disagree with L. Gordon Crovitz’s Wall Street Journal editorial “Who Really Invented the Internet?” The piece attempts to discredit the important role that government played in the nurturing of our dominant medium, trying to shift all the credit to the free market. That’s ideology masquerading as history. An excerpt:

“A telling moment in the presidential race came recently when Barack Obama said: ‘If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.’ He justified elevating bureaucrats over entrepreneurs by referring to bridges and roads, adding: ‘The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all companies could make money off the Internet.’

It’s an urban legend that the government launched the Internet. The myth is that the Pentagon created the Internet to keep its communications lines up even in a nuclear strike. The truth is a more interesting story about how innovation happens—and about how hard it is to build successful technology companies even once the government gets out of the way.”