The wonderful irony is that this historic opportunity comes to governments in part because of an innovation that they unleashed on the world: the Internet, probably the clearest example of the way that public- and private-sector innovation can complement each other. The generative platform of the Internet (and the Web) has created a space where countless fortunes have been made over the past thirty years, but the platform itself was created by the loose affiliation of information scientists around the world, funded, in large part, by the federal government of the United States.
