My first post on here. I was intending to post an introduction but I was too busy doing things...like working a job, running a business (I built it! I also built the Internet it runs on! Ignore what I post below! It was all me!), being a dad, etc.
In fact, I was questioning whether or not to blog on here at all. I'm not sure how much I will, to be honest, but when something like this ridiculous claim comes along I have to respond.
I was a math and computer guy in college and I was in college during the mid- to late-90s. The internet as we know it today was in its infancy. I still remember browsing the web on a text-based browser in my dorm room my freshman year and being amazed by how I could connect with people across the world, read so many things from anywhere, send messages to friends no matter where they were. I was so awestruck by this that I wanted to learn all I could about it.
What I learned almost instantly is that the internet had actually been around for a while. The underlying infrastructure, ARPANET, was built in the 1960s under the umbrella of the Department of Defense (A government agency, say it ain't so!). I learned more details through my own research and in classes throughout my schooling.
Yes, it's true. Xerox created the Ethernet roughly a decade after the government created ARPANET and the internet would not be all that useful without the Ethernet. Many other private companies did a lot to further the internet. However, without the government and ARPANET, the internet would not have been available. Yes, it probably would have been developed by some private corporation somewhere along the line. Maybe in the 80s, maybe in the 90s. However, it was developed in the 60s by the government. Without that early development, it would have taken much longer to develop and build upon to become the worldwide information transfer and communication platform it is now. We would have been decades behind where we are now and my internet business I started while still in school may not exist today, 13 years after I originally started it.
The fact that the internet was created by the Department of Defense was always viewed as a fact. By every expert I've known, by every professor who brought it up in school, by everyone who knows a darn thing about the history of the internet. Now, Republicans are going to try to say government did not only not create the internet but it actually stalled the creation? No, this is absolute bull. We can not allow this revisionist history to happen.
Republicans have done this repeatedly. They take clear facts, such as the internet was created by a government agency, and somehow manage to turn them into questionable "opinions". This is not a questionable opinion. It is fact.