This has the feel of a "history by the victors" view.

There were contemporaneous research networks in a range of different countries, some - like the UK NPL network - which influenced ARPANET in various ways (the term "packet switching" comes from Donald Davies work on NPLs network; though Paul Baran at RAND beat Davies to inventing, Davies was not made aware of Baran's work until a year after he'd independently invented it and was told by the UK MoD), and most of them became part of the internet rather than being replaced by it.

Pouzin, designing the French CYCLADES, beat ARPANET to a layered architecture with the connection endpoints responsible for reliability in the vein of TCP. Both Davies and Pouzin provided feedback to Kahn and Cerf on TCP and are acknowledged in their papers.

The internet looks most like ARPANET looking backwards because of a combination of the military interests in the early international connections which made ARPANET the first to see significant push in international expansion before other standardisation efforts got traction, coupled with the simplicity of TCP/IP.

To the international push, Norway got the first international link to ARPANET because of NORSAR[1] - a seismic array used to monitor Soviet nuclear tests.

The NORSAR link led to work on connecting UCL in the UK, and led to work on gatewaying the UK network to ARPANET, and also led to e.g. Kirstein's [2] involvement with the spread of TCP/IP. See [3] for example. Or this article on his Marconi prize [4] which talks about how Kirstein was instrumental in helping TCP/IP win out over OSI in Europe.

Had ARPANET simply never happened, history would certainly have looked different, but we most likely would still have had an internet. Whether it'd have the characteristics we like about the current internet is an open question, but it's worth noting that people like Kirstein pushed an open interconnection model that ultimately contributed to the "win" of TCP/IP because a lot of the European networks were already getting connected by the time ARPANET opened up, and so Kirstein's work on promoting TCP/IP and interconnection to ARPANET gave TCP/IP a leg up in the race to define the internetworking protocol set.

E.g. by 1976 at least 6 European countries had national networks interconnected via EIN; by 1979 Euronet connected at least 9. Euronet was operated by private providers.

By that point a number of public and private providers in Europe were also offering packet-switched services to private companies. By 1978, X.25 was internationally available via IPSS, linking a number of different national providers.

The irony of mentioning Minitel is that if anything, Minitel was in many ways a demonstration of what the internet could have ended up as had the "everything should be a market" crowd won out - it nickel and dimed almost everything. But Minitel was not the only French network.

But "everything should be a market" in the sense implied above (the nickel and diming approach of Xanadu etc.) is entirely orthogonal to liberalism.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NORSAR

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_T._Kirstein

[3] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/1455416

[4] http://www.marconisociety.org/index.php/newsroom/379-peter-k...