Would th Internet have become a reality had the U.S government not given millions of dollars to its developmen

Question

Do you feel that the Internet have become a reality had the U.S government, or any other government, not allowed millions of dollars to its development and construction? Why? or Why not?

Answer 1

No because it was invented by the british war was invented by the USA

Answer 2

Let's see... the Internet started as a military project... so, no.

Before people started finding out about the Internet, everyone was using services like AOL, Compuserve, and Prodigy. They were separate services all to themselves (like imagine never leaving aol.com (which i know some people probably don't anyway, but whatever)) and didn't connect to the internet at all (except eventually they did for email, after customers expressed they wanted to send mail to people on other services). They all cost a monthly fee.

If there had been no government-run, generally free (aside from pay-based web services, internet access only costs money because the phone companies charge for the use of the wires) network of computers already existing, would the private sector come up with it anyway? I say no, because they were interested in competing with each other, not interoperating. Why should Prodigy let Compuserve customers use its system when they have their own paying customers? It's also unclear how the systems would have sent email to each other without the Internet. Even today, cellphone companies use the Internet to make it possible to send SMS between their companies' networks.

The only way the private sector could and would have created an interoperable network would be if it had all ended up being owned by the same company. (And that would be a monopoly, which is illegal, and which could charge whatever it wanted, and block whomever it wanted, etc. Which, I guess, the phone companies already want to do anyway.)

Answer 3

The internet has been in around since the 50's. Although it wasn't called the WWW until the early 90's and there were no comercial sites with neat graphics, but cold black screens and text.

The early net was text driven, as most computers were, and used for communication between Universities by scientiest, and government workers from thier agencies.

The first comercial use of the net was Email than Commerse that didn't stop growing until the internet of today!

Answer 4

did the government really invest money to make the internet reality?
I am mean I have always thought that private businesses made the internet reality because we still pay for the internet. internet is never free.

Answer 5

Internet is to communciation what Hummer is to transportation.

Government spending is limitless when the cause is deemed necessary; thus we have hummers and internet.

Could the private sector have done it better? No doubt, it could've; it just didn't.

Cheers,

pup

Answer 6

maybe, but not if AL gore didn't take the initiative in inventing it