The Right Lies About Who invented the Internet

Slate wrote Who invented the Internet?: The outrageous conservative claim that every tech innovation came from private enterprise

"Suddenly, though, the government’s role in the Internet’s creation is being cast into doubt. “It’s an urban legend that the government launched the Internet,” Gordon Crovitz, the former publisher of the Wall Street Journal, argued Monday in a widely linked Journal op-ed. Instead, Crovitz believes that “full credit” for the Internet’s creation ought to go to Xerox, whose Silicon Valley research facility, Xerox PARC, created the Ethernet networking standard as well as the first graphical computer (famously the inspiration for Apple’s Mac). According to Crovitz, not only did the government not create the Internet, it slowed its arrival—that researchers were hassled by “bureaucrats” who stymied the network’s success. “It's important to understand the history of the Internet because it's too often wrongly cited to justify big government,” Crovitz says."

I try not to hate the right, I really do but every week there's another bullshit claim like this. And it's not just from the fringe, it gets picked up and repeated but all on the right. Slate goes on to say:

"Crovitz’s entire yarn is almost hysterically false. He gets basic history wrong, he gets the Internet’s defining technologies wrong, and, most importantly, he misses the important interplay between public and private funds that has been necessary for all great modern technological advances."

and of course they're right. I think another reason conservatives want to believe their bullshit is if they thought that the government funded the creation of the Internet, they might also have to admit that Al Gore pushed hard for a lot of that funding over many years.