> My comment here was based entirely on what actually happened
I'm not disagreeing with your historical account, just what you derived from it.
You're essentially arguing networks would never exist unless the U.S government made it happen -- and that's why government must act as an "entrepreneur". I hear you, I'm saying this is naive and without evidence, and most likely exists to support your opinions of central planning. It's been tried, I recommend you investigate the history behind that (hint: it doesn't end well).
Your argument here takes my claim that there are cases where government infrastructure bootstrapping (interstate highways, Internet) is useful and concludes that I would be in favor of a command-and-control economy.
This is a classic reductio ad absurdum fallacy, and only works if your concept of how the economy works is very ideological.
You're confusing principle with ideology. We're discussing central planning verses distributed planning. I'm for a distributed economy that resembles a p2p network. I support p2p networks because it's robust and lacks a single point of failure -- and it's difficult to corrupt. You're saying, p2p networks will never work, because it's too ideological. Ok, cool story bro. But why is a centralized protocol better? That's what I want to know. There is no "hybrid" protocol, if a protocol is contingent on a centralized aspect, then it's a centralized protocol. Just because you have no principle doesn't make your ideology "moderate".
the real world is more complicated than you think it is. it's not a binary choice between p2p networks and command and control economies.
bring your analogy back to the real world. the fact that government funds research does not preclude additional research. maybe the internet would have been invented without government funding, maybe not; i don't know, and neither do you.
the point is that it's good to fund research because it can progress research. your analogy makes no sense, because "p2p" and "centralized protocol" are not mutually exclusive. in the current world, the government funds research, but (in general), it doesn't prevent anyone from funding research, so if you want to fund your own research, you can.
there's no hybrid protocol, but the real world is a hybrid system. some research is privately funded, some is publicly funded. i think its good that way
I'm not disagreeing with your historical account, just what you derived from it.
You're essentially arguing networks would never exist unless the U.S government made it happen -- and that's why government must act as an "entrepreneur". I hear you, I'm saying this is naive and without evidence, and most likely exists to support your opinions of central planning. It's been tried, I recommend you investigate the history behind that (hint: it doesn't end well).