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A comment on Your online identity is owned by your email provider (2019). Parent comment

Re:Your online identity is owned by your email provider (2019) by seti0Cha on Friday August 26, 2022 @10:33AM (#32608045)
Inventing and turning into usable product are not the same skill sets, nor is maintaining. If, today, you survey which websites are the most robust, the most user friendly, the most performant, the most functional, or most economical, you are very unlikely to settle on one produced and maintained by the government, or even a university. I've noticed in recent years that some government websites have actually become fairly usable, but I would not say I've ever been impressed by one.

Also, maybe I'm missing your point, but it seems very strange to say they internet was transferred to private enterprise. Private enterprise built on a government foundation, but almost everything that people use the internet for now was built by private enterprise, and the standards which constitute the most important contribution of the government were not, and are not now, under corporate ownership.

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Re:Your online identity is owned by your email provider (2019) by schmudde on Sunday August 28, 2022 @04:49PM (#32631925)
The public internet backbone (NSFNET 41) was officially decommissioned on 30 April 1995. This essentially marks the birth of today’s commercial internet.

The ground was set by the Scientific and Advanced-Technology Act on October 2, 1992. This passed Congress with almost no debate. However, there were innovative politicians who attempted to allocate a certain amount of bandwidth for a public right-of-way.

The United States has very little publicly-owned internet infrastructure and few advanced digital public services. The USA also happens to lag behind other nations in simple metrics like the speed that ISPs deliver. Maybe it's a coincidence that many of these nations have more robust public services.

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