At least not now. That’s what occurred to me when I read this article at Aeon on Soviet attempts to implement something analogous to the network that has become the global Internet. I think that the development of the Internet was an accident of history and that if it hadn’t been invented when it was it wouldn’t have been invented at all.
The history of the Internet goes back about forty years to the ARPANet. The protocols that define the Internet were a federally-funded attempt to produce a computer network that could survive a nuclear war. That’s obviously a product of the Cold War.
The first commercial Internet service providers started up in the late 1980s and in 1992 the Scientific and Advanced-Technology Act largely opened up the Internet to commercial use. I don’t think it was a coincidence that took place at the very peak of neoliberalism in the United States.
There had been many previous attempts at producing largescale commercial networks. France had a national network that preceded the Internet. They had all failed to gain widespread acceptance. It took something non-proprietary to gain that kind of acceptance and that just would not have been possible unless the Internet had developed very much as it did.
You would have had AOL style networks, and likely, they would have eventually connected.
For those who are not familiar, AOL was “the Internet with training wheels”. In reality, it was all training wheels, and the users were locked in the AOL “garden”. Eventually, they let the users out, but even then, I think they had to jump through hoops.