Federal role was crucial to Internet

Since it's fashionable to question if government can do anything right, it's worth noting we're about to celebrate the 40th anniversary of one of the most important federal initiatives of our time.

The event was the launch of the Internet, which we date from Oct. 29, 1969, when a refrigerator-sized special purpose computer in Leonard Kleinrock's lab at the University of California, Los Angeles, transmitted its first message to a twin machine in Menlo Park, Calif.

That was the first exchange over what was known as the ARPAnet, which evolved into the Internet.

The ARPAnet had been hatched many years earlier in the mind of Pentagon researcher Robert W. Taylor. His role reminds us that sometimes private enterprise not only isn't up to the task of advancing technological progress but even gets in the way. Then it's crucial for the government to step in.

Taylor, now 77, eventually moved to Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, the legendary PARC, where he oversaw the team responsible for such inventions as the personal computer, Ethernet and the visual computer display.

As chief of information-technology at the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) in 1966, he demanded the multitude of computer research projects he was funding learn to talk to one another.

By the end of the year he had secured a $1 million appropriation for the design and construction of a network.

Taylor foresaw that the network he ordered would evolve beyond an administrative convenience.

In a 1968 paper, he wrote the network would provide some services for which you would "subscribe on a regular basis," like investment advice, and others that you would "call for when you need them," like dictionaries and encyclopedias. Communicating online, it concluded, "will be as natural an extension of individual work as face-to-face communication is now."

Taylor tried, and failed, to interest private industry in his project. IBM told him its computers already talked to one another, completely missing his point that their computers should talk to everyone else's.

Taylor's experience underscores the importance of a government role in fields like basic research, which profit-seeking enterprises tend to shun.

Taylor's ARPAnet was eventually turned over to the National Science Foundation, which in 1991 opened what was then known as NSFnet to commercial exploitation. Four years later, the dot-com boom was under way.

Taylor believes that, despite the Web's successful commercialization, it may be time for the government to play a stronger role.

The corporations making billions of dollars from the Web haven't done their part to build up its capacity, so a shortage looms as customers increasingly use the network for bandwidth-hogging tasks such as downloading movies. Instead, they're plotting to profiteer from the bandwidth scarcity by raising rates.

He thinks the proper model for the Internet, given its critical role in our lives today, is as a taxpayer-supported service available to everybody, rich or poor, at no charge.

Both notions spring from his experience witnessing the interaction of government and private enterprise.

"The idea that private industry can always do something better than the government is false and sad and divisive," Taylor observed recently. "People should know better."