> You seem to be arguing against a view that USans invented everything about internetworking

No, I was arguing that there is sufficient evidence that the basic internetworking would have been independently invented even if ARPANET had never happened, and that as such, this is also not supported by history:

> What I was saying is that the US is where the internet got deployed

This is why I said it read like a "history by the victors" view.

"The internet" got only got deployed in the US if you take the view that the dozens of other contemporaneous networks at the time did not combine with ARPANET to form the internet, but that ARPANET alone became the internet and replaced the others, or in the strict technical sense that "the Internet" was first used about what sprung out of ARPANET. So, sure, "the" Internet arguably got deployed in the US.

But many internets were built in the 1970's. And while ARPANET was early in some respect (e.g. packet switching was first invented at RAND), many of the aspects were also invented or reinvented independently elsewhere, and both academic and commercial deployment of internationally internetworked networks was well developed long before ARPANET connectivity became widely available internationally.

As such, an internet would have still existed had ARPANET never happened. It'd have looked different, but not that different.

We're left with something ARPANET flavoured because TCP/IP won and existing networks were gradually switched to TCP/IP, not because there weren't alternatives, because there were multiple commercial and public alternatives by the late 70's, predating both TCP/IP and the opening up of access to ARPANET. If you wanted global networking at that time, you'd likely buy access from an X.25 provider, so had ARPANET and/or TCP/IP failed entirely, at worst we'd still have services built on an X.25 descendant (that truly is the worst timeline.... shudder). [Compuserve and Tymnet both used X.25 for at least parts of their networks]

Even by the time I started an ISP in '95, not everyone were still convinced TCP/IP was the way forward, and people were still doing things like tunnelling TCP/IP over X.25 because X.25 was still more easily available some places.

> I don't think "everything should be a market" is orthogonal to liberalism. At a large enough social scale, liberalism always produces markets unless warfare erupts; strong restrictions on commerce are necessary to prevent markets from arising among groups much larger than Dunbar's number.

The point is that the commenter above was not arguing against the existence of markets, but the kind of nickel and diming proposed by Xanadu on expectation of markets for everything. But in terms of writing and knowledge, one of the things the Xanadu people failed to grasp is that the supply far outstrips the demand. For most writing there is no commercial market. In fact, for a whole lot of writing, the commercial value of the writing as a product is negative: people want to pay to push it on others more than people want to pay to read it. Trying to build markets for ideological reasons even where a whole lot of people are desperate for distribution rather than payment is a folly.

So I agree with you that liberalism will always produce markets, but I don't think that is relevant to the point. The ideological bent to try to find ways to extract money out of everything is a particular right-libertarian/objectivist subset of liberalist ideologies that most liberalist ideologies do not share.