The Internet is proof that government doesn't bungle everything

Since it's so fashionable these days to question whether government can do anything right -- whether it's regulating banks, bolstering the economy or overseeing healthcare -- it's worth noting that 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 engineering lab at UCLA transmitted its first message to a twin machine in Menlo Park, Calif. (The message was the first two letters of the command "Login.") That was the first exchange over what was then known as the ARPAnet, which evolved, after many intermediate steps, into what we know today as the Internet. Former-Pentagon research official Robert W. 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 like downloading movies. Instead, service providers are plotting to profiteer from the bandwidth scarcity by hiking user fees. "The telecommunications industry has promised us for years that if we only let them raise prices and do mergers, they'd increase bandwidth," Taylor said this week. "They haven't kept their promise." 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. What he learned then he still believes. "The idea that private industry can always do something better than the government is false and sad and divisive," Taylor observed at the University of Texas event. "People should know better."