Over 11 pages of Tea Party activists/groups signed this letter and not one person caught the huge factual inaccuracy in the fourth paragraph? The one about 1994 being “before the Internet was ever conceived”? Even if whoever actually wrote this letter doesn’t know the difference between the Internet and the World Wide Web (I don’t personally think the average non-geek needs to know the difference, however when we’re talking about Internet policy you damn well should know the difference) and was sourcing the date that Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the WWW, the citation of 1994 is still not correct, as “before the [WWW] was ever conceived” would be 1988 at the latest. But assuming they DID know the difference between Internet and WWW, it seems they didn’t take the time to quickly use the Google to find out a quick history of the Internet. Or, if they prefer, they could look it up on Conservapedia, which tells us that TCP/IP (basically what makes the Internet run) was invented in the 1970s, about 2 decades before 1994.
On a side note, Conservapedia’s article on the Internet mentions Al Gore’s famous slip-up and explains why he said what he said: in 1991 he sponsored a bill that helped fund many computer projects, including the Internet and the first graphical web browser. I mention this because the aforementioned letter starts out “Over the past 25 years, the Internet has flourished in large part due to the extremely limited role that government has played.”
Now, interpretations of “extremely limited” will vary, but I’d say the Congressional Act that Wikipedia credits with “building the Information Superhighway”, was lauded by then-president Bush and caused Marc Andreessen (a co-creator of the aforementioned web browser and now a private venture capitalist involved with Digg, Twitter, Facebook and Skype) to comment “If it had been left to private industry, it wouldn’t have happened, at least, not until years later” doesn’t really count as “extremely limited” in any way, shape or form.
That bill was in 1991. Last I checked, 1991 was 19 years ago, which is less than 25 years ago.
Get your numbers right, Tea Party, and we might be able to talk about “so-called ‘Net Neutrality’ regulations,” but until then leave the Internet policy debates to people who actually understand it. Or know how to use Conservapedia.
OK, one last thing: dig into the history of ICANN and you can see the hand of the government all through it. It’s pretty technical and it’s hard to follow some of the different trails, but it’s clear that the US government has had a hand in Internet policy ever since the beginning, and still does.