This is an example of not being able to see the path not taken. But rest assured, it was there. Yes, the internet arose out of the protocols created by DARPA. But it was not necessary for government to be involved - at the time the internet got started there were already competing private protocols springing up. There is no doubt in my mind that had the goverment never involved itself in networking at all, we’d still have an internet today. The underlying protocols might be a little different, but the end result was the same.
I was involved heavily in the pre-internet online communications sphere. Not only were there private BBS’s everywhere, but they were starting to link together through protocols like fidonet. Companies like Galacticomm were creating hardware and software to allow the construction of early non-internet ISP’s. I ran one of their systems commercially - we could bring in as many as 64 phone lines into a single PC and enable online chatting, multiplayer games, E-mail, etc. We were part of an E-mail network of similar nodes that allowed people to send files and E-mails around the world.
At the same time, CompuServe was a very large computer system that was available through a network backbone. They made that available commercially as well, so that people could dial local numbers and connect to remote systems. AOL also appeared around this time.
All of these networks, plus several others, were rapidly evolving. My company sold a text-retrieval system that had a Google-link interface that allowed people to connect to our computer and search for keywords through thousands of documents.
What actually happened is that the internet was opened up to the public, and because it had been government subsidized and had a large, existing infrastructure it simply displaced all the other networks. But anyone active at the time could have seen the potential for any of these other networks, or a combination of them, to become ‘the internet’.
In any event, the actual underlying protocols and the first backbones were just a kickstart - what we think of today as ‘the internet’ is everything built on top of all of that. Giving government credit for what the internet is today is like giving Henry Ford credit for the entire automobile industry. Ford may have been there first and rapidly became the biggest, but there were many other competing auto companies and had Ford not been there, someone else would have filled the vacuum.
That may be changing. The Obama administration has proposed a number of new regulations to be applied to the internet. Congress wants internet taxes. Other governments want international policing of the internet. Big entertainment is successfully getting increasingly draconian laws passed restricting how we use data on the internet. There are calls for international regulatory agencies to control the internet to prevent ‘subversive’ speech. If we’re not vigilant, the internet will eventually be smothered by government like most other things.
One of the difficulties people seem to have grokking capitalism and libertarianism is that they simply don’t understand how spontaneous order happens. They think the alternative to central planning is chaos.
Imagine if the government had taken upon itself to invent the airplane. Let’s say it spent huge amounts of money and employed all the best engineers in a grand project to learn how to fly. If it succeeded, people today would be saying that it’s obvious that man would never have learned the secret of flight without the government. The notion that a couple of bicycle makers could have achieved that in their garage would have been ludicrous. But it happened that way, because the Wrights stood on the shoulders of all the other people who tried and failed. Each failure taught us a little more, and eventually we got to the point where the materials and understanding came together to enable someone to build an airplane. It wasn’t just the Wright Brothers - it was the people who developed lightweight engines, and who experimented with control systems and materials.
Look at the early progress of aviation - mostly without government being involved at all. Major advances in aerodynamics came from wealthy industrialists sponsoring prizes that attracted innovators. People like Howard Hughes put their fortunes into research and development. Early great fighter planes of WWII like the Spitfire were based on seaplane racers built for the burgeoning air race industry. Along the way, passenger planes and the first airlines got underway.
To enable this, private industry had to work out a million different standards for materials, fasteners, fuels and lubricants, you name it. And the same is true today. If you can’t conceive of a widespread communications network like the internet being created without government planning, just look around you at the immense interrelated supply chains that go into providing the products you use. Look at all the complex standards that have arisen out of the private market - everything from database standards to screwdriver bits to connection protocols for electronic devices.
There is nothing unique about the internet that required the government to build it. Is just so happens that the government was involved, and therefore it got the jump on private industry. But it certainly wasn’t necessary.
It’s even a stretch to say that the government was responsible for planning the early internet. DARPA had its own reasons for a fault-tolerant network, and universities took part in it to share information. But it didn’t look anything like today’s internet outside of the simple protocols that are still in use. And in fact, opening it up to commercial use was opposed by most of the people heavily involved in the internet at the time. They didn’t want the great unwashed coming in and wrecking ‘their’ network. And in fact, I recall many people claiming that business interests would destroy the network - it would never stand up to the load, there was no way to make sure that there was enough bandwidth and there would be a digital ‘tragedy of the commons’ whereby everyone grabbed up all the bandwidth they could until the whole thing would be glutted, etc.
Even the major protocol that has defined what we think of as the internet (HTTP and HTML) was developed essentially by a lone programmer at CERN, not even affiliated with the US government. He wasn’t a part of some top-down government plan to build out an internet. These innovations came from scientific institutions and educational institutions not because there’s anything special about government, but because such people were the only ones who had access to it because it was locked away from the public.
Since the public and business have had access to it, many of the new protocols and languages (ASP, JSP, PHP, Flash, Javascript, Acrobat, AJAX, and many more) were developed by private interests.
You don’t need to imagine this - you just have to look around. Private interests invest huge amounts of money in basic R&D. Have you seen what’s going on in the private space industry? Microsoft has an R&D budget of billions of dollars per year. The SETI telescope array was funded by Paul Allen. The cosmic background radiation was discovered by private researchers at Bell labs.
The Human Genome Project was a huge government program to map the human genome. It cost about $3 billion dollars. At the same time, a private company achieved essentially the same thing at 1/10 the cost.
In fact, there is evidence that government R&D spending just displaces private R&D, rather than supplementing it. Look at the first table in this article in the Economist. Total R&D spending in the U.S. has fluctuated between 2 and 3% of GDP, but government R&D has fluctuated between 2% and .6% of GDP. When the government was spending 2% of GDP, private industry was spending about 1%. Today, the government only spends about .6% of GDP on R&D, but private industry has taken up the slack and spends about 2% of GDP on research.
And a lot of this research isn’t just commercial short-term stuff like figuring out a better iPhone display. Private companies do a surprising amount of very basic research. Large industrial firms like Motorola, Microsoft, Lucent, GE, Boeing, and the like spend huge amounts on speculative basic research.