> The publicly funded IT industry gave us C, UNIX, the TCP/IP, the Web, and all the foundations we've built our things on.

Please don't rewrite history.

Web/WWW: ok, CERN. Yeah. That's publicly funded.

C and UNIX were invented at Bell Labs. That wasn't publicly funded.

Most people know TCP/IP was built upon ARPANET which was a defense project. OK, you can argue it was publicly funded through our taxes and a bunch of R&D happened stateside at several universities and the RAND Corporation, but this wasn't some gift to the American public.

the TL;DR is: the first full public demo was in DC in 1972, but it started in secrecy as Project CAM (not to be confused with Project Camelot, which it merged with later). The entire point of ARPANET was to help dismantle communism worldwide. Simulmatics Corp was basically a military contractor that worked on ARPANET 1961-1968 in South Vietnam to compile data on communists and make that database available to the military/government over a network. The data they promised to the military included:

• Public opinion polls from all countries
• Cultural patterns of all the tribes and peoples of the world
• Archives on comparative communism… files on the contemporary world communist movements
• Political participation of various countries.… This includes such variables as voting, membership in associations, activity of political parties, etc.
• Youth movements
• Mass unrest and political movements under conditions of rapid social change
• Data on national integration, particularly in “plural” societies; the integration of ethnic, racial and religious minorities; the merging or splitting of present political units
• International propaganda output
• Peasant attitudes and behavior
• International armament expenditures and trends


ARPANET and TCP/IP was not some wonderful gift from a benevolent government using our public funds generously to improve technology in America or the world. It was a spy tool with very nefarious intentions.