Who really invented the internet?

This is a strange and pretty sloppy article. For example:<p><i>If the government didn't invent the Internet, who did? Vinton Cerf developed the TCP/IP protocol, the Internet's backbone, and Tim Berners-Lee gets credit for hyperlinks.</i><p>How is that a counterexample? Those are two examples of the government inventing key parts of the internet! Tim Berners-Lee worked for CERN, and Vinton Cerf worked for DARPA (and during some of the time at UCLA and Stanford... pursuant to DARPA grants).<p>Plenty of other problems, such as attempting to minimize the role of ARPANet, which is just absurd. I'd nominate the following article as a better starting point, and chalk the WSJ op-ed up to election-year silliness: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet</a>

The only accurate statement in this article is that the government resisted commercial use of the the internet for a long time.<p>The rest it total garbage, written by someone who denies <i>facts</i> to promote an agenda. This is what is really sad. I mean, come on, the government (primarily DOD) <i>of course</i> spearheaded ARPANET, NSFNET, etc. which morphed into the internet we know of today. It's indisputable - <i>funding</i> poured into universities, and into private contractors (like BB&#38;N) to work on this. Even Silicon Valley itself, it can be argued, wouldn't be here if it weren't for the government in the early days.<p>This is not to say that the government is wonderful, or that it is good, or should be larger in our lives, or anything like that - but, a FACT is a FACT. These birthers and creationists and other deniers just make up things to fit their models. To me, that is incredibly dangerous.<p>And note that the guy who wrote this article has "impressive" credentials - Yale, law school, Rhodes Scholar. But he doesn't <i>have a clue</i> about how modern technology works! (equating Xerox's Ethernet with the "internet", for example). This is pathetic, and pathetic that the "venerated" Wall Street Journal would publish this nonsense.

What a misinformed article! the passage easiest to shoot down is where the author shows that he thinks "the Ethernet" was some sort of network of networks:<p>&#62;the Ethernet was developed to link different computer networks.<p>Does anyone know what aspect of Ethernet the author might be misinterpreting here?

The first paragraph explains the context of the article:<p>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."<p>This seems designed to discredit Obama's claim that the government performs useful functions. The WSJ was acquired by Rupert Murdoch a few years ago (Fox News). Since then, the editorial page has been politicized.

Par for the course for the opinion/editorial pages of the WSJ. If they are this sloppy and dishonest on subjects one knows about, how can they be trusted on any subject.