https://medium.com/@jjw_27023/the-undefended-principles-of-a-free-internet-eac26498881b

James J. WardBlockedUnblockFollowFollowingApr 15For most of us who remember a time before widespread access to the Internet (it was mostly Donald Duck games on your Commodore), going online was a decidedly American-feeling affair. One could be forgiven the thought, given that the largest internet service provider for years was….America Online. And, largely, that tracked the history and development of the Internet (even though Tim Berners-Lee is British, and wrote the code for the Web while at CERN). You may know that the Internet itself is simply a successor to the Defense Department’s ARPANET, designed to keep military posts connected in case of nuclear war.

That belief hardly holds true today, when the number of non-US Internet users is now ten times the entire population of this country, and steadily growing. Some of this has to do with the standard progression of new technologies from their countries of origin around the globe: high prices keep the technology from penetrating less-wealthy markets for some time, and then as competition increases and prices fall, new markets get the new, cheaper technology seemingly all at once. It’s why there has been a massive proliferation of internet-connected cellphones throughout the Global South.