The internet was not a government gift to humanity. Private companies built it. ARPANET, the 1969 Defense Department research network, connected four university nodes and moved data between government contractors. That is where the state's contribution ends. What you actually use today, the commercial web you shop on, stream from, and communicate through, came from private investment and entrepreneurial competition in the 1990s after the National Science Foundation lifted its ban on commercial traffic in 1991. Tim Berners-Lee wrote the World Wide Web protocols at CERN, a physics lab, not the Pentagon. Netscape, a private company funded by venture capital, built the browser that made the web accessible to ordinary people. MCI and Sprint built the backbone infrastructure. Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark did more for your internet access than any defense appropriations committee ever did. This matters because the myth works as a rhetorical weapon. Every time a politician wants to justify funding some new bureaucratic technology initiative, someone invokes DARPA like a prayer. The implication is that without government seed money, private actors sit paralyzed. History says otherwise. The telephone, the automobile, commercial aviation: entrepreneurs drove all of it, with government typically arriving late to regulate the profits out of whatever was working. ARPANET was a narrow military communications tool. Profit motive turned it into civilization's nervous system. Remember which institution did which job.