sloth unleashed

“It’s an urban legend that the government launched the Internet,” writes L. Gordon Crovitz in Monday’s Wall Street Journal, launching into just one of a myriad of problems with his short opinion piece.

While he concedes that the military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) program funded the creation of the ARPAnet, the first large-scale packet-switched network, he argues that the government doesn’t deserve credit for the creation of the Internet:

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.

But full credit goes to the company where [Robert Taylor] worked after leaving ARPA: Xerox. It was at the Xerox PARC labs in Silicon Valley in the 1970s that the Ethernet was developed to link different computer networks. Researchers there also developed the first personal computer (the Xerox Alto) and the graphical user interface that still drives computer usage today.

Crovitz is right that Vinton Cerf, along with Bob Kahn, invented the TCP/IP protocol that is the foundation of the modern Internet. But he neglects to mention that Cerf’s early work on the protocol was funded by the US military through its DARPA program.

“Hyperlinks” are not the Internet, and Tim Berners-Lee didn’t invent them. Nor is the World Wide Web the Internet, although the Web has become such a popular Internet application that many people confuse the two. But more to the point, Berners-Lee was working at CERN, a research organization funded by European governments, when he invented the World Wide Web in the early 1990s.

Xerox is indeed a private company, and Xerox PARC researchers did develop some important computing technologies, including Ethernet and the graphical user interface. But it’s not accurate to say that “the Ethernet was developed to link different computer networks.” Ethernet was designed primarily as a local networking technology to connect computers in a home or office. The point of the Internet’s TCP/IP protocol was to allow networks using different standards, including Ethernet, to communicate with each other. Many of the networks that now comprise the Internet use the Ethernet protocol, but what makes the Internet the Internet is TCP/IP, not Ethernet.

Indeed, not only is Crovitz confused about the origins of the Internet, he also seems not to understand the conventions of the World Wide Web. He quotes George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen as saying that “The Internet, in fact, reaffirms the basic free market critique of large government.” But that quote wasn’t written by Cowen. It was quoted by Cowen in a 2005 blog post.The page Cowen was quoting has succumbed to bitrot, but the Internet Archive has a copy.

The Wall Street Journal has earned a reputation for producing in-depth and meticulously fact-checked news coverage. Unfortunately, it doesn’t always apply that same high standard of quality to their editorial page.