Heck, the guy doesn’t even understand the protocols he’s talking about. He’s describing Ethernet as a protocol for connecting networks together. This is false. Ethernet is a local area network protocol for creating a network. He does mention TCP/IP, and that’s the important one for connecting networks together. Ethernet just happens to be the protocol which won, but there have been plenty of various LAN protocols over time.
I can remember using ARPANET back in my undergrad days before the internet really got opened to general use. Back then it was restricted mostly to universities, defense and research labs.
It was when Tim Bethers-Lee came up with the html protocol at CERN that the internet exploded. Before that it was limited to email and netnews groups which were just text based forums. I spent a lot of time on those old forums.
I can still remember when the post doc came into the lab to show off Mosaic to demonstrate this new web thing. The software was extremely buggy and there was about nothing to connect to in any case. Amazing how far it has all come.
There is some truth to the contention that the government invented the internet, but only in terms of the DARPA projects as you say, though the guy invented html on CERN’s dime which is government as well. Fully blossoming it into what it is today was a matter of private enterprise and it really does show the value of the free market because the whole internet/web area of commerce was so poorly understood by governments that they didn’t vaguely know how to start regulating it. Thus it was not strangled in infancy.
***BUMP***
Dr Buzzard, you have indeed nailed it (w/apologies to Laz lol)
You make a good point, that a part of the Internet's infancy occurred in government funded projects. But thank goodness that it was the free market where the Internet grew up. I once had a conversation with an Air Force major, trying to explain to him that "there is NO SUCH THING and an OSI compliant TCP/IP protocol stack!" This was back in the day when the government declared that government agencies needed to have OSI compliant software - to the best of my knowledge, that would have limited their networking software to Decnet (Phase III, I think). I shudder to think what government control of the Internet and its protocols would look like today.
Mark