ARPANET, the Beginning of the Internet
Libertarians often cite the internet as a case in point that liberty is the mother of innovation. Opponents quickly counter that the internet was a government program, proving once again that markets must be guided by the steady hand of the state. In one sense the critics are correct, though not in ways they understand. The internet indeed began as a typical government program, the ARPANET, designed to share mainframe computing power and to establish a secure military communications network. Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), now DARPA, of the United States Department of Defense, funded the original network.
Of course the designers could not have foreseen what the (commercial) internet has become. Still, this reality has important implications for how the internet works — and explains why there are so many roadblocks in the continued development of online technologies. It is only thanks to market participants that the internet became something other than a typical government program: inefficient, overcapitalized, and not directed toward socially useful purposes.