Here is a sharp contradiction at the heart of the modern world: the most transformative communications system in human history was built by a military agency that never intended to give it away.

In the early 1960s, a researcher named J. C. R. Licklider, working for the United States Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency, proposed something almost laughable at the time: a universal network connecting every computer to every other. Most computers then filled entire rooms and served single institutions. The idea that they might talk to one another across continents was, to most people, science fiction.

The first real test came on 29 October 1969, when two network nodes went live, one at the University of California, Los Angeles, and one at the Stanford Research Institute. That two-node experiment, called ARPANET, was the seed. Within two years, fifteen sites were connected.

The decisive leap came in 1974, when Vint Cerf at Stanford and Bob Kahn at DARPA published a proposal for a shared language all networks could speak, what became TCP/IP. Standardised in 1982, this protocol suite meant that no single government, company, or institution could own the whole network. That deliberate choice, no central authority, is why the Internet grew the way it did: organically, unstoppably, and faster than anyone planned.

Then, late in 1990, a British scientist named Tim Berners-Lee, working at the physics laboratory CERN in Switzerland, finished building something on top of the Internet's infrastructure: the World Wide Web. By Christmas that year he had written the first web browser, the first web server, and the first web pages. The Internet had existed for two decades; the Web made it legible to everyone.

By 1995 the last restrictions on commercial traffic were lifted. Traffic doubled roughly every eighteen months. In 1993 the Internet carried about one per cent of all telecommunicated information worldwide. By 2007 that figure was over ninety-seven per cent. Every telephone call, newspaper, bank, and broadcast had been pulled inside it.

What Licklider's military agency never foresaw was that the network built for resilience against catastrophe would become the infrastructure of ordinary life, and that giving it no owner would mean no one could ever take it back.