Letters to the editor

Birth of the internet

Martin Vander Weyer’s excellent piece (‘The UN and the internet’, 26 November) should also have pointed out that the internet was a US defence project. In the 1960s military analysts saw the potential for a fault-tolerant command-and-control network in the event of all-out nuclear war. In collaboration with major universities (including UCL in London) the US Defense Department funded MILNET, which in the late 1970s became the internet. It is therefore jolly kind of them to let us use it in all its derived forms without any royalty, in spite of what it cost the US taxpayer. Likewise, it is kind of them to let us use GPS (Global Positioning System) royalty-free — another US military project.

In both these cases the squabbling control-freaks of Europe and other minor countries are trying to reinvent the wheel in order to increase the sizes of their bureaucracies and exert control on their citizens.