[cube13]

>There are many alternative ways a global network could and would have developed without US government initiation. But it's also possible that the US government stimulus made it happen sooner and more centralized to the US (some of Fidonet's development came from Russia.)

But none of those became what we use today. That's the key point here. You can argue that it would have happened anyway, or that some other network protocol or technology was superior and should have been used instead of what we use today, but that's not what the article is saying.

The research that was funded by ARPA became the baseline for what would become the Internet. That's what happened.