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submitted 2 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

Why do americans assume they invented the Internet also known as a Interconnected Network which evolved out of multiple countries connecting their academic networks together creating an interconnected network which evolved into the internet when non academic users where granted access

No one country can claim that they invented the Internet

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[-] [email protected] 69 points 2 days ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET

The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was the first wide-area packet-switched network with distributed control and one of the first computer networks to implement the TCP/IP protocol suite. Both technologies became the technical foundation of the Internet. The ARPANET was established by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (now DARPA) of the United States Department of Defense.

[-] [email protected] 58 points 2 days ago

That's not an assumption, that's an easily verified fact.

Were you maybe thinking of the world wide web?

Edit: lol, love the downvotes but the fact that the US invented the Internet remains, well, you know, a fact.

[-] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Even the WWW was actually popularized first in the US, specifically NCSA made the first web browser with inline image support which is the origin story for every modern browser (and is part of why every browser's "User-Agent" identifies itself as some variety of "Mozilla"... the "Mo-" comes originally from Mosaic).

Of course they were not the only people ever involved at any step or of any specific technology, exclusively, but the US played a huge and honestly significantly outsized part in the initial development of the internet as we know it, and that continued for decades (and arguably still does). That's why they can and do claim responsibility. Because in very large part, they are responsible. It's not unfair to acknowledge facts. Someone had to lead the way. That was the US. Others followed, and helped, and sometimes led a little bit of the way in a particular area. But mostly, the US led the way to the modern Internet, leveraging both significant government funding and the tech-utopians of academia, then-established-but-now-forgotten tech industry veterans like Xerox and DEC, and the capitalist innovators of Silicon Valley to attract and support the best people and ideas they could use to win almost every tech race they participated in, which was almost all of them.

[-] [email protected] 48 points 2 days ago

It's because they did:

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet

Sure, it's possible that a global internet may have evolved later from other nations... but it didn't.

[-] [email protected] 32 points 2 days ago

DARPA may disagree.

[-] [email protected] 31 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

DARPA invented TCP/IP and AT&T, IBM and DEC were the first to implement it as a standard. The world wide web was developed at CERN by a man from the UK.

[-] [email protected] 17 points 2 days ago

Because the first long distance use was kids at Stanford using it with kids from UCLA...

I don't know if it was the very first thing. But it was almost immediately used to sell weed.

And the first use that used at least two nodes was a dude in NYC.

Where do you think it was invented?

[-] [email protected] 12 points 2 days ago

You're getting a lot of comments correctly pointing out that ARPANET was actually invented by the US in the 1970s and was the precursor to the Internet. I think it's your question which is phrased incorrectly, and not the point you're trying to make. Assuming this and rephrasing your question to mean the World Wide Web (not the Internet), you're correct, that was created by Tim Berners-Lee while working at CERN in the 1990s, approximately 20 years after ARPANET. This brought along Hypertext websites, and basically was another step in the foundation of the internet as we know it today.

So rephrasing your question to "why do americans assume they invented the web (websites)?", it's mainly because the underlying infrastructure of the internet was originally developed by the US government, so even before websites existed, domain names were heavily American leaning, with .gov being US Government websites, and .edu being US Universities, etc. Other countries at the time had ccTLD for their country code, like .uk, .au, etc and when it came time to assign domain names, they chose to use .co.uk or .com.au for example, rather than .com.

I assume that americans rarely encounter a .com.au or other ccTLD domain names, and largely are going to .com websites. They probably assume that the .au TLD was tacked on to support Australia because they didn't invent the internet.

[-] [email protected] 9 points 2 days ago
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[-] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

Tomato tomato

[-] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago
[-] [email protected] 9 points 2 days ago
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[-] [email protected] 18 points 2 days ago

Did you mean to post this to a shitpost community and missed?

this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2025
-44 points (21.1% liked)

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