Public Subsidy, Private Profit

When Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone in January 2007, the crowd responded as if Apple had conjured something from nothing. What neither Jobs nor the press mentioned was that every technology in that device had been developed with government money. The internet it connected to had been built by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The GPS it used had been developed and maintained by the US Air Force, which had turned off the deliberate signal degradation for civilian users only seven years earlier. Its touchscreen came from research supported by the National Science Foundation, which Apple had acquired by buying a small company called FingerWorks in 2005. Siri, added to the iPhone 4S in 2011, had started as a DARPA-funded project at SRI International. The government took the risk; the investors who held Apple stock reaped the benefits. This pattern is not unique to Apple. The internet began as ARPANET, a network funded by the Department of Defense from 1969 to connect…