Telegraph.com
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New Page 1
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by Peter G. Klein
Libertarians often cite the internet as a case in point that liberty is the mother of innovation. Opponents quickly counter that the internet was a government program, proving once again that markets must be guided by the steady hand of the state.
The internet indeed began as a typical government program, the ARPANET, designed to share mainframe computing power and to establish a secure military communications network.
Of course the designers could not have foreseen what the (commercial) internet has become. Still, this reality has important implications for how the internet works — and explains why there are so many roadblocks in the continued development of online technologies. It is only thanks to market participants that the internet became something other than a typical government program: inefficient, overcapitalized, and not directed toward socially useful purposes.
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