Goveernment good for small business, high speed brodband access edition.

Among the least considered implications of the vaunted transition to the "Information Economy," poor families may lack the ability to pay for expensive internet access, much less access bundled with expensive cable tv music packages.

[The ARRA broadband programs weren't aimed specifically at small businesses, but they have benefitted, the GAO report said. Agency investigators interviewed 27 small-business representatives in communities with government-funded broadband projects, and 20 of them reported higher speeds, the report said.

Eighteen of the 27 small businesses reported more reliable broadband service since the government funded networks were deployed, with many government-funded projects using fiber optic infrastructure. "These small businesses said they experience less network downtime and no significant slowdowns in speed at points in the day when usage increased," the report said.]   emphasis added

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9246864/Gov_t_funded_broadband_benefits_small_businesses

So in this aspect decidedly un-Reaganesque trickle down theory has benefits for the commonweal.

US Government DID Create the Internet

Any rational student of history knows this as true by looking at the facts.  Although as with many technological advances such as the telephone or manned flight can have more than one author from different areas of the globe, US scientists working in the military, with the military, and at public and private universities working under federal government grants created the processes which work together as the world wide web.


Current conservatives with their blind ideology hold with myth of Ronald Raygunz that government creates problems and stifles individual human freedom.


"Modern" "conservative" chuckle heads can't even conceive of the notion that people order their society through government to do things we cannot do individually, or by tribe, or even by city or state: the interstate highway system (Thanks, President Eisenhower!), Hoover Dam, or even bloody well landing humans on the moon  (20 July 1969) AND returning them safely to Earth--all projects which increase the commonweal (http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/preamble).


Daresay even the great state of Texas or my humble state home of best place on the planet, Florida, could not have accomplished that absent investment and coordination of federal government through NASA and a virtual army of engineers, technicians, bookkeepers, and bureaucrats.


So yes, idiots and others who ignore facts, government programs led to the creation of the internets.


Of course with the power of google algorithms, you will find mountains of false crap to confirm your own ideology.


Or you can try to find the truth.

[If you spend time looking at the history of the Internet, you’ll find the government there at every step. Researchers working directly for the government and at university labs funded by the government were some of the first people on the planet to think up a worldwide network, and, at the beginning, they were the only people working to build such an outlandish thing. That’s not true just of the Internet. Pop open your smartphone and you’ll find government research at the heart of just about every component, from the batteries to the GPS chip to the microprocessor to the multitouch interface.

This doesn’t mean that the government deserves all credit for creating your phone. But it does mean that President Obama was right—in tech, no one does anything on his own. Useful products are usually the result of years of research by smart people at various instituitions: government labs, university labs, and corporate R&D campuses. The history of the Internet, like much of everything else that makes our world so magical, proves that in the tech industry, it takes a village.

If you want to find out who built the Internet and why, there are a few main sources you should consult. If you’ve got time, read Where Wizards Stay Up Late, Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon’s definitive history of the founding of the worldwide network. If you don’t have much time, look at A Brief History of the Internet, written by many of the scientists who worked on the system in its early days. The many Wikipedia articles on the history of the Internet are also quite helpful. All these sources put the lie to Crovitz’s ridiculously partisan theory that Xerox, and not the government, created the Internet.]
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2012/07/who_invented_the_internet_the_outrageous_conservative_claim_that_every_tech_innovation_came_from_private_enterprise_.h
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