>Because nation states are well known for producing usable software at a reasonable cost to tax payers?
The largest transfer of public property into the hands of private enterprise in human history was the Internet. At that time it was wild and limitless and full of promise. It’s pretty much stagnated from there.
Just like scientific and medical research, tech research is the most effective and has the largest societal benefit when done at public universities on the taxpayer’s dime.
Inventing and turning into usable product are not the same skill sets, nor is maintaining. If, today, you survey which websites are the most robust, the most user friendly, the most performant, the most functional, or most economical, you are very unlikely to settle on one produced and maintained by the government, or even a university. I've noticed in recent years that some government websites have actually become fairly usable, but I would not say I've ever been impressed by one.
Also, maybe I'm missing your point, but it seems very strange to say they internet was transferred to private enterprise. Private enterprise built on a government foundation, but almost everything that people use the internet for now was built by private enterprise, and the standards which constitute the most important contribution of the government were not, and are not now, under corporate ownership.
The public internet backbone (NSFNET 41) was officially decommissioned on 30 April 1995. This essentially marks the birth of today’s commercial internet.
The ground was set by the Scientific and Advanced-Technology Act on October 2, 1992. This passed Congress with almost no debate. However, there were innovative politicians who attempted to allocate a certain amount of bandwidth for a public right-of-way.
The United States has very little publicly-owned internet infrastructure and few advanced digital public services. The USA also happens to lag behind other nations in simple metrics like the speed that ISPs deliver. Maybe it's a coincidence that many of these nations have more robust public services.
> Just like scientific and medical research, tech research is the most effective and has the largest societal benefit when done at public universities on the taxpayer’s dime.
Was that entirely private? I thought Bell Labs was getting operating budget from Western Electric, which while also private, as I recall, was getting massive investment from the US government to develop infrastructure across the USA? And then wasn't there also DARPA funding? Also, they seemed unaggressive with their patents, licensing tons of them quite freely.
Also, is it good that Bell labs was the way it was? Americans seem to have quite a hard go with telecom, maybe not as bad as some countries, but from what I can see the country is riddled with regional functional monopolies, gaps in service, high prices for rural areas, and bad behavior regarding net neutrality on the part of ISPs. Perhaps the situation wouldn't be so bad if the USA had nationalized, or at least partially nationalized, its phone and internet systems?
The largest transfer of public property into the hands of private enterprise in human history was the Internet. At that time it was wild and limitless and full of promise. It’s pretty much stagnated from there.
Just like scientific and medical research, tech research is the most effective and has the largest societal benefit when done at public universities on the taxpayer’s dime.