[ih] A revolution in Internet point-of-view - Was Re: Internet analyses (Was Re: IPv8...)

[Andrew Sullivan]

Hi,

On Sun, May 10, 2026 at 05:09:52PM -0500, Greg Skinner via Internet-history wrot

>I’m not sure what Andrew Sullivan meant by “give away.” IMO, the USG had a much more liberal attitude towards 1970s and 1980s Internet technology, as well as the Internet itself, than it did towards cryptographic technology at that time.  The history of PGP <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy> provides an example of this.  If the Internet and/or Internet technology had been subject to tighter access and export controls, neither might have (as easily) become what they are today.  (I realize there is a lot more to this, and would welcome others who have much more experience than I do in this area to comment.)
>

I have at least two, maybe three, distinct things in mind (it depends on whether you think 3, below, is just a subspecies of one of the other 2)

1.  The decision to be as liberal as suggested, above.  This extends I think to the general attitude about TCP/IP and the funding of the BSD UNIX TCP/IP stack, which guaranteed the code would be available at least for other researchers.  This might even extend to the decision by the military to continue with TCP/IP instead of committing to GOSIP.  Partly, as I think has been noted elsewhere in the thread, this was a result of the intellectual property rules about government-funded work of that period.  But of course, that just punts the problem a little distance: it was a period where governments were not regarded as a kind of deficient corporate private enterprise, but instead a distinct mode of doing things with expectations about what the upshot of that work would be.  After all, when the ARPANET work was getting going, the people funding it must have had some inkling about what it meant for the USG to fund something, even if (as later BBN assertions about ownership tried to say) there was not complete agreement about that meaning.

2.  The decision to move the NSFNet out of the way of a burgeoning network of networks that had all manner of commercial traffic, so that the Internet could really take off.  I have seen several claims (some on this list but also more strongly elsewhere) to the effect that the increasing traffic on private networks that were sort-of interconnected to the NSFNet had created a problem that could only be resolved the way it was.  But that is not true: MILNET didn't draw that conclusion, but instead drew the conclusion that it needed to extract itself from certain kinds of interconnections, and make sure they didn't happen again.  It would have been possible (even if less than great) to insist that a network that was just for research was a legitimate thing that needed to be preserved, quite apart from other networks that could be useful to serve commercial needs.  When I heard Al Gore talk about this, however, he said that he perceived the opportunity in making this product of (not incidentally, government-funded) research into the basis for the kind of information infrastructure that many people in the era thought to be important.  It's also clear from what he said, and also from looking at the historical record, that there was political capital that had to be expended to make things work out as they did.  I don't feel especially excited about whether one calls this "priming the pump" as opposed to "giving away": the central point is that rather than reserving the maturing product of government-funded research to the government of the US or even just to the United States, the USG of the day decided that this could all just take off in the market with as little government involvement as needed.  (I find the mental experiment of imagining any of that happening in the present age to be an instructive, not to say depressing, lesson.)

3.  The plan from the Clinton Administration (finally realized at the end of the Obama Administration) to get the USG out of a special role in the administration of certain parameters of the Net (the so-called IANA transition), which explicitly disclaimed the special status of the USG in the administration of the Internet (indeed, that disclaiming was the very thing Ted Cruz objected to).

I think each of these represents a way in which the USG decided that its better role was creating the conditions and, having done so, to stand back and let the newly planted seeds take root and bloom.  A different country (say, France with minitel) or a society with different preoccupations about what to do with knowledge (say, a later administration -- can't think of which one off the top of my head) would likely have reacted differently, either from being interested in pursuing control (possibly hegemonic and either primary control within the Administration or maybe primarily national control) or from being interested in extracting the absolute maximum monetary rewards from the system and its operation.

It is almost incredible to me that some kind of cartel-like control or enclosure of the Internet didn't happen from the beginning (though I can construct a pretty good argument it's happening now). Much of my life I have witnessed governments take perfectly well-admninistered public goods and hand them over to private operators who do, at best, no better a job but who make everything more expensive.  (At worst, those operators actually sabotage the service.)  The Internet work didn't go that way, perhaps partly because it was built from individual (already partly self-interested) netowrks. I like to call what happened "giving away" because of the way that constrasts with the usual contemporary narrative about how government "ought to be run like a business."  But if people prefer the metaphor of "priming the pump", I don't especially care.  It still seems to me to be a remarkably different set of social expectations than what obtains today.

Best regards,

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
ajs at crankycanuck.ca