Just like France’s massive investment in the Minitel gave it a jump on the Internet?
The US government was the first to begin the ‘internet’. It was a government program so it is an example where government did some good/partnering with technology. It came out of defense.
“This Internet Timeline begins in 1962, before the word Internet is invented. The worlds 10,000 computers are primitive, although they cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. They have only a few thousand words of magnetic core memory, and programming them is far from easy.
Domestically, data communication over the phone lines is an AT&T monopoly. The Picturephone of 1939, shown again at the New York Worlds Fair in 1964, is still AT&Ts answer to the future of worldwide communications.
But the four-year old Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the U.S. Department of Defense, a future-oriented funder of high-risk, high-gain research, lays the groundwork for what becomes the ARPANET and, much later, the Internet.”