> The early net worked much the same way as a personal network between friends. If you wanted to join, you could run your own cable to someone who was connected; charging for connections and data transfer came much later. Of course someone had to rig and maintain a cable (or make regular phone connections, or what have you), and wires don't grow on trees, but this wasn't on a commercial basis in the early days; it was a research project for some but mostly just a thing cool people did; those who could contributed and those who couldn't didn't, like a potluck.

That's called a Local Area Network, or LAN. Not internet.

> Nonsense; 1993 is decades into the development of the net.

That was not the 'Internet' either. That was ARPAnet, which is also not the same as 'the internet'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET

To be fair though, this is much closer to the internet we ended up with than the prior mentioned LAN (Local Area Network).

And to be fair again, you could technically make your own internet or maybe more accurately 'intranet' via LAN, but it still would not be the world wide internet as we knew it back then, or today.

> The government was one entity among many that ran parts of the net in some countries. They may have ran the biggest and most important connections, but they weren't the whole thing; the whole point of the net is that it's a network, with no single point of failure.

Let me tell you about backbone connections then. If those go down, basically everyone's internet is down. Depends on which ones, which goes hand in hand with your comment here; but ultimately if the right backbones connections go down, it may as well be a shut down of the entire internet since many areas won't be able to access other areas networks; and due to the massive influx of people trying to figure out what's going on, a sort of DDoS of sorts will ensue from all those attempts to connect to whatever else remains online. If it can be connected to at all. For example, Google. Google has world wide servers, and thus can be connected to from almost anywhere. But if the backbones are down, then only local connections might be able to ping google. Pinging google is a typical way for people to test if they have a working connection. That or cloudflare with 1.1.1.1 for a quick ping test when google isn't the quick resort. The point?

Well, if everyone starts trying to ping the only connections available to their area, then those servers better be able to take that sudden congestion, which will result in the internet essentially going down for everyone. There are caveats I admit, but the point here is that the internet is not quite as failure redundant as you seem to think it is. If it was, we would have cellular backhaul being used to ensure that at least basic connections can be made for information purposes and emergencies. But that would require world wide 5G and 6G cellular to be used. Which I guarantee you would not be free.

> Nah, the government takes what it can and sometimes pays for things, but there's no real connection between those two actions. Government-provided stuff is free.

Truth be told, I understand your reticence to agree with this, since the way governments do things in different countries can make this difficult to talk about. But the basic premise is this. The government's coffers are filled via 2 main sources. Taxes, and Investments of some sort. A 3rd form exists in the case of lobbying and bribes, but that's a different beast all together.

In general, public services tend to be paid for via the taxes the government takes from our pocket, and so regardless of what name is attached to that money given, like in the case of America with its department of defense; that money did ultimately contain some portion or majority made up of tax payer money.

But to say there is no real connection between these two actions just shows me that you may need to expand your thinking on this subject matter, because it's more nuanced than you seem to think, if you think government provided stuff is free.

It's not. That money paying for it comes from us all in some form or another.

That said, there is a caveat here as well. America providing internet to North America did mean that Canadians getting to use the connections at the earliest points would have been getting something of a free service to some degree; since Canadians like me didn't really put money into that via our taxes. But through trade agreements and other such things, our government probably did contribute to it in some way; and so our taxes did contribute in some manner. It's hard to say without going through all the fine point details. But suffice to say; nothing government provides is truly free. It's paid for somehow. Even if they just print off more dollars, we pay for that printing via inflation and higher costs due to it.

Nothing, is free.