IIRC, the internet was developed by the military and then was further used by universities. It was only, relatively, recently that it was expanded to business and other uses.
The internet was originally the concept of scientists at various universities who had email and chat functions (kind of a crude intranet) on their universities’ computer and wanted to communicate and share data. The next step was DARPANET, developed by the Defense Advanced Projects Administration in northern Virginia. But it was essentially private enterprise that recognized the enormous commercial possibilities of connected computers and ran with it. If we had continued to wait for government to roll it out, we’d all still be on dialup AOL 2.0 and consider ourselves lucky. ONLY competition and the promise of some payoff stirs humans to strive and innovate.
That’s a gross oversimplification of the origins of the Internet. There were all kinds of other computer-to-terminal and then peer-to-peer protocols used in industry through the ‘60s and ‘70s, when BBN did its first work on Arpanet. Those, particularly packet-switching, protocols in various forms evolved for more disparate, multi-computer networks. There was a lot of interchange back and forth between those worlds as competing and subsequent protocols—most especially TCP/IP were developed and adopted as open standards.
It’s not like academia and business were sitting there like baby birds, mouths agape, waiting for the federal government to put Internet goodies into their mouths. All kinds of alternatives were about and could have been adopted in various ways. “The Internet” as we know it really came about IMO not even with the ‘worldwide web’, but with the Mosaic browser, which was dreamed up by academic technology students who, yes, worked in a lab with federal funding. They later commercialized it via Netscape.
Recently? Like, twenty years ago?
True, the internet basically expanded from DARPA. But government didn't supply the ideas for the businesses that have been created to complement the 'message board' that began as DARPA.
Many businesses are created as the opposite of something already there, or to provide an adjunct to an existing business. Doesn't mean the original business provided any of the capital to start the subsequent businesses, it only provided that spark of imagination for them.
Yes, and the government, military or otherwise, couldn't have done anything without the money that funds them. That money came from taxes from the private sector. Wealth is not something that just ‘exists’, to be ‘equally distributed’. It takes human effort to create wealth from ideas and raw material. It used to be that in America anyone could expect to have a good shot at a piece of wealth if they came up with a good idea and worked hard. Now, we have obscured that connection, and it is threatening the very soul of the nation.
Close, it was developed FOR the military BY the universities.
That’s right. As late as 1993 I had to visit the college to access the Internet. We had America Online dial-up (and terrific long distance bills given our remote location).