Internet

The Internet is a system of computer networks connected by an Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP) that is now used worldwide. The facility supports what is commonly referred to as e-mail as well. The Internet is evolving to include video and other services and eventually it is thought, all communication presentations and facilities will run through the Internet – from movies, to television programs to a panorama of phone services and social networks.

Many who believe in free-markets and free-market thinking see the Internet as the most significant communications development since the Gutenberg press, yet ironically the Internet got its start as a project of The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), an agency of the United States Department of Defense. DARPA was created in 1958 to combat Russian technological advances such as Sputnik and even today DARPA's mission is focused on staying more technologically advanced than other countries and potential enemies.

While DARPA did help develop the basic blocks of the Internet, it is most doubtful that the DARPA braintrust anticipated anything like what the Internet has become. The Internet and the freely accessible information flowing through it has severely damaged the power elite's dominant social themes and control of society. No, the limning of the Net's power was never that clear – or not until it was occurring – and by then it was too late.

Thus, the proximate cause of the Internet's power and ubiquity turns out not to be the initial development by DARPA but something else. It was a private technological breakthrough – the PC and floppy discs – that blew up the Internet. There is no evidence that DARPA anticipated the advent of the PC, anymore than it anticipated that a little military facility would turn into the worldwide web.

So here is the real history. It was a tiny thing. It began as a military facility and became a way to share white papers. It soon married itself to an email protocol and became established at universities. Then the PC, discovered in a garage by the founders of Apple, gradually turned the facility into a mainstream tool.

The Internet in its current incarnation was a mistake – a facility that the power elite would never have willingly developed had they known the ramifications of its true impacts. There is no way that the powers-that-be would willing have cooperated with a facility that has virtually blown up its painstakingly erected mainstream media and cost literally trillions in sunk costs that cannot be recovered.

There is no guarantee in the short term that the power elite shall be able to tame the Internet or stop its effects. In any event, one could make the case that it is already far too late and that the education has taken place and the damage to these fear-based promotions is irrevocable, at least for a generation or more. Maintaining that the power elite planned for the Internet and its unrolling impact would be, in our estimation, a kind of promotion of itself, and one we would not agree with.

The Internet was a spontaneous development, an example of FA Hayek's spontaneous order. And while the government may have "founded" the Internet, it is the private marketplace that has elaborated on it and made it the epoch-changing, earth shattering event that it has become.