I certainly agree that government funded research and development is not very efficient. However private industry r&d is aimed at developing products that can be brought to market within a reasonable period of time. Spending hundreds of millions on research without a clear vision of what profits would be derived from that research is left mostly to government and foundations.A good question. ARPANet was a computer network that connected US defense installations and also some universities. It was not the only network in existence at that time. In fact, the only thing that made ARPANet unique was its "meta-network" nature, that is, its connecting of integrated networks together over very long distances. Even the packet system in the early ARPANet protocols was not unique or unprecedented. "Packet" network models had been described long before ARPANet came along.Did the government help Bill Gates with Microsoft?
Did the government help Steve Jobs with Apple?
And where do you thing Apple and Microsoft would be today without the government funding for ARPANET, the precursor for today's Internet, NASA's Apollo program that funded the development of large scale integrated circuits and microprocessors, the government funding that put millions of computers and networks in our schools, the government funded research and development in the 1940's that lead to the first large scale computers.
The explosion of the desktop PC and its millions of private users, more than any technical issues related to how to format or route packets over an "inter-network", is what made the Web the invaluable part of everyday life that it has become.
If you spend hundreds of billions of dollars per year on research projects, inevitably, some of the developments will be used as components in valuable consumer products. It's impossible to spend that much money and not produce something of some redeeming value. That ARPANet was retooled and re-used by the public to suit its purposes, ultimately becoming the Web, is not any sort of credit to the government. It's just an unavoidable result of spending billions and billions of taxpayers dollars on all sorts of speculative projects. The real question is whether those billions of dollars would have been better spent elsewhere. The answer is certainly yes. Inter-networks existed, outside of ARPANet, and those inter-networks would have become the Web (in some ways, they did too, as the modern Web is cobbled together from many sources). The horn-blowing of DARPA regarding ARPANet is just bureaucratic back-patting.
Source and more information.
Yes, intellectual monopoly benefits companies granted the monopoly. But such laws cause many problems, such as centralizing power, hindering innovation, and reducing competion. If you grant certain companies privileges, of course they will be better off. That doesn't mean those privileges are justified, nor does it mean they are beneficial to consumers.Then there are the laws that protect copyrights and intellectual properties and the treaties of 1996 that protect both Microsoft, Apple, and other software developers in other countries.
NASA provided the funding for development of the first microprocessors in the 1960's. Private industry wasn't interested in this r&d work because there was no market for the product until NASA created the market. Then, development in the 70's by private industry moved at rapid pace.