It's also worth pointing out that many of those "wonderful things" had to be regulated by governments due to how bad their business practices and environmental effects are when pursuing making money. Sure, we have cars, but that's coming from the same industry that brought us leaded fuel and global warming.
Besides, I've listed several times a number of other networks that sprang up. If it wasn't Arpanet, one of the others would have become dominant. The reason is simple - anyone with two or more computers tried to connect them together. The notion that we'd still not have any interconnections between them if it wasn't for Arpanet is just silly.
As for bad environmental effects, socialism has a much worse track record. Free markets produce enough surplus that costly mitigations become practical.
Claining that the internet evolved from telegraph is very much bad faith, but the worse part about this argument is that it's wrong: the first country-scale telegraph network was indeed funded by the French government[1].
> As for bad environmental effects, socialism has a much worse track record
Why are you guys obsessed so much with socialism? There is no mention of socialism anywhere in this thread. Government funding stuff has nothing to do with socialism in the first place, otherwise it would mean that every developed country is a socialist one, with the only non-socialist countries being failed states like Somalia which really isn't the argument you want to make.
> Free markets produce enough surplus that costly mitigations become practical.
“Free market” doesn't exist, it's a propaganda phrase with no basis on reality. The government always and everywhere has a key role to play in the economy, by counteracting all kinds of negative outcomes that arise from markets (mitigating crashes or maintaining consumer trust through regulations to name a few).
Edit out swipes like this from comments on HN please, no matter what you're referring to.
