The Internet’s Public Tab and Meta’s Private Receipt
ARPANET, UCLA research, and DARPA belong in the internet’s origin story. Public and university work helped establish the foundations; Facebook arrived later as a private platform, and Meta built an advertising economy on top of the digital world people use. That isn’t the same as saying the public owned the whole internet or Meta took it over. It is a reason not to tell the platform’s success story as if every useful connection began with a company logo.
Here’s my user-dividend audit: advertising and platform wealth on one side; ordinary people supplying attention, logging in, and accepting terms on the other. No legal claim to Meta’s profits is needed to ask why the rewards look so concentrated. The public helped lay some of the road. Our payout is access, a password reset, and another “agree” button. Somewhere, the tollbooth has a very good ad business.