Moyer is just another half-truth opinion. He calls the internet a 'visionary infrastructure project" when it was nothing of the sort. ARPAnet was simply a military project intended as a tool for military research and later some sort of military comm network. Moyer is repeating the Obama falsehood that ARPAnet was created 'so that people could make money'.
ARPAnet in that form was not useful for broader application and nobody promoted as such then. HTML and the world wide web later made it more useiul along with network hardware and architectures developed at other places. The internet is the result of a bunch of unrelated efforts and the hardware is mostly in private hands propelled forward by the needs and visions of many. What it isn't is some sort of stroke of centralized government led genius, in fact the idea of networking is only logical necessity and not some out of the blue revolutionay idea.
True enough government funding started it, but eventually it would ahve happened anyway as a result of personal computing.
If I were trying to find an example of something that government only could have done I'd stick to mostly roads and cops. If nuclear fusion ever works then that will be a government only success story because nobody in the right mind is going have the patience or the money. There are a few others where government helped things, like in purifying silicon, or the human genome project. In general the sucesses take a long time to realize, nobody can predict them, and the success rate is low. Industry is far more efficient with their mony because they have to be. If a DARPA program manager fails, he simply moves on to the next project. If Intel fails, they lose their jobs. Guess who might be better at economic innovation?
