Bob Metcalfe, self professed “conservative hippie,” inventor of the Ethernet, founder of 3Com, of Xerox Parc fame, has this to offer:
> One of the few things that government should do is finance research, because — I have learned from many years — the only companies that can afford to do research are monopolies. Real companies cannot afford to do research other than monopolies. And there are some famous ones. The telephone monopoly — Bell Labs. The computer monopoly — Watson Labs. The copier monopoly — Xerox Parc. And on it goes. In retrospect the monopolies aren't worth it for the research they do. It's nauseating how much we hear about how cool Bell Labs was, but other than the transistor and Unix and the princess telephone, what did we get for all that money? And then for years AT&T as a monopoly sat on innovation — and IBM after that, and Xerox after that — it's just not worth it, so let's kill those monopolies. And if we need research, have it done at research universities. And the other spin I would offer there: as a practitioner of technological innovation, I worry about technology transfer — how do you get technology transferred from the lab into the marketplace. And the best way to do that is with people; and it is the business of universities to graduate people. So let's do our research there, and I think the ARPANet is a great example where government financed the research.
> One of the few things that government should do is finance research, because — I have learned from many years — the only companies that can afford to do research are monopolies. Real companies cannot afford to do research other than monopolies. And there are some famous ones. The telephone monopoly — Bell Labs. The computer monopoly — Watson Labs. The copier monopoly — Xerox Parc. And on it goes. In retrospect the monopolies aren't worth it for the research they do. It's nauseating how much we hear about how cool Bell Labs was, but other than the transistor and Unix and the princess telephone, what did we get for all that money? And then for years AT&T as a monopoly sat on innovation — and IBM after that, and Xerox after that — it's just not worth it, so let's kill those monopolies. And if we need research, have it done at research universities. And the other spin I would offer there: as a practitioner of technological innovation, I worry about technology transfer — how do you get technology transferred from the lab into the marketplace. And the best way to do that is with people; and it is the business of universities to graduate people. So let's do our research there, and I think the ARPANet is a great example where government financed the research.
Source: https://youtu.be/zKz07DdaKzw?t=3772