The first global computer networks took root in the US thanks to
well-regulated state funding and collaborative research environments,
while the contemporary (and notably independent) national network
efforts in the USSR floundered due to unregulated competition and
institutional infighting among Soviet administrators. The first global
computer network emerged thanks to capitalists behaving like cooperative
socialists, not socialists behaving like competitive capitalists.
...[W]e should not take too much comfort from the fact that the global
internet first evolved thanks to cooperative capitalists, not
competitive socialists: the story of the Soviet internet is a reminder
that we internet users enjoy no guarantees that the private interests
propping up the internet will behave any better than those greater
forces whose unwillingness to cooperate not only spelled the end of
Soviet electronic socialism but threatens to end the current chapter in
our network age.
-- Benjamin Peters.
"How the Soviets invented the internet and why it didn't work"
Aeon (17 October, 2016)
https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-soviets-invented-the-internet-and-why-it-didn-t-work