The Internet as Collective Invention

| Dick Langlois |

Further to Peter’s post on government science funding: I just received, hot off the (physical) press, a copy of Shane Greenstein’s new book How the Internet Became Commercial (Princeton, 2015). Among the myths that Greenstein — now apparently at Harvard Business School — debunks is the idea that the internet was in any sense a product of government industrial policy. Although government had many varied and uncoordinated influences on the development of the technology, the emergence of the Internet was ultimately an example of what the economic historian Robert Allen called collective invention. It was very much a spontaneous process. And it was not fundamentally different from other episodes of technological change in history.