In an opinion piece on Sunday, WSJ columnist L. Gordon Crovitz attacked Barack Obama’s recent claim that the Internet was created by government research.  Crovitz hypocritically preached, “It’s an urban legend that the government launched the Internet…The truth is a more interesting story about how innovation happens—and about how hard it is to build successful technology companies even once the government gets out of the way.” 

Internet backlash was nearly immediate, with Scientific American leading the charge. Crovitz claimed that workers at Xerox had come up with Ethernet connections, which Steve Jobs basically stole from under their noses in 1979.  As SA notes, “Crovitz seems to confuse the Internet—at heart, a set of protocols designed to allow far-flung computer networks to communicate with one another—with Ethernet, a protocol for connecting nearby computers into a local network.” Ars Technia and Tech Pinions pointed out glaring errors in both Crovitz’ argument, and his fundamental understanding of what the Internet is.  Then Michael Hiltzik, author of Dealers of Lightning, the history of Xerox that Crovitz uses as source material, publically corrected Crovitz: “While I’m gratified in a sense that he cites my book, it’s my duty to point out that he’s wrong. My book bolsters, not contradicts, the argument that the Internet had its roots in the ARPANet, a government project.” Finally Xerox spokesman Bill McKee affirmed that “Robert Metcalfe, researcher at PARC, invented Ethernet as a way to connect Xerox printers and the Alto computer, but inventing Ethernet is not the same as inventing the Internet.” On his LA Times blog piece, Hiltzik concluded, “It’s true that the Internet took off after it was privatized in 1995,” he concluded. “But to be privatized, first you have to be government-owned. It’s another testament to people often demeaned as ‘government bureaucrats’ that they saw that the moment had come to set their child free.”

Crovitz isn’t just some schlub with a blog –he’s currently an advisor to media technology companies, he’s a former publisher of the Wall Street Journal, former executive vice-president of Dow Jones (a publishing and financial information firm), he co-founded Journalism Online, he’s been named to the Silicon Alley 100, and led the charge that grew the Wall Street Journal Online to the world’s largest paid subscription news site.  How or Why could he possibly get this idea so glaringly wrong?   I think the first person I wouldn’t not ask is Mitt Romney…but I guess we’ll never know.  At least there are people like Michael Hiltzik who are ready to drop the hammer when need be.