[ih] Politics behind the Internet

[Karl Auerbach]

The US government is a big animal, actually a herd of big animals, so 
awareness of, and interest in, non-circuit switched network technology 
arose in different places, at different times, and at different rates. 
(There was, of course, a lot of recognition of circuit switched networks.)

In 1978 I was thinking of joining the office of the Legal Advisor at the 
US State Dept or the chief counsel's office at then rather new NTIA.  At 
the State Dept there was essentially no recognition of the nascent 
networks and their underlying packet switching technologies.  But over 
at NTIA there were a very few of us - two of us were from SDC - who had 
had contact with the various network systems that were then starting to 
recognize the need for something with fewer connectivity lumps and 
greater extent.

At that time my head was down in the world of computer/database privacy 
and international data flows of personally identifiable information 
rather than in the nuts and bolts of networking and security that I had 
worked on at SDC.  (I had been working on computer privacy for quite a 
while - somewhere in my paper archives are letters that Senator Sam 
Ervin and I had exchanged - during the time he was chairing the 
Watergate hearings! - about US privacy policy.)

During the 1970s at SDC I mostly worked on military related networks 
(mostly classified and thus not well known.)  It was pretty clear that 
even from the early 1970s that the US military was aware of the value of 
wide-scale connectivity, not just between stationary computer centers 
but also on a tactical, mobile, in-the-field basis.  (During that time 
we worked with the US Marines on what would today be called a mesh 
network - Dave Kaufman and I joked that our backpack-mounted nodes were 
of such size and weight that only the bigger Marines would be able to 
haul the gear - I couldn't lift it.)

In the mid 1980's when I worked on the magnetic confinement fusion (MFE) 
project out at the Livermore Labs we had an ad hoc network that was 
beginning to interconnect with other academic and research networks.  It 
was all very klunky and duct-tape-and-bailing-wire, but the value was 
well recognized.

In those years (mid 1980's) USENET was growing like wildfire and showing 
people, many of whom were in government positions, the value of having 
network based bapplications like email and netnews.  There were many 
people with feet in both the evolving Internet and in Usenet; the two 
networks intellectually pollenized one another, particularly at the 
application layer.

To my mind one of the most important inflection points of US government 
interest in something resembling today's Internet was the Air Force's 
ULANA procurement.  They wanted commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) 
networking gear that they could just hook up and go.  That procurement 
pushed a lot of energy into coercing vendors to actually assure 
interoperability.  Those vendors were mostly small at that time - for 
instance, Cisco was still a garage operation.  (Our group, TRW, lead by 
Geoff Baehr and David Kaufman, won the bid, but AT&T protested and the 
entire procurement crumbled as a result and never was actually awarded. 
But the concept of real interoperability had taken root.)

	--karl--

On 7/21/24 4:47 AM, Gergely Buday via Internet-history wrote:

> when the American Congress realised the importance of the Internet?
> 
> Back in the eighties we were listening the Radio Free Europe on shortwave
> radios. Congress supported that financially. Did it have similar thoughts
> concerning the Internet, that it would spread freedom politically and
> economically?