The internet and many adjacent technologies were all created and iterated on inside the DoD and other wings of government research.

The world really benefits from well funded institutions doing research and development. Medicine has also largely advanced due in part to this.

What’s lost is the recapture. I don’t think governments are typically the best candidate to bring a new technology to marketable applications, but I do think they should be able to force terms of licensure and royalties. Keeping both those costs predictable and flat across industry would drive even more innovation to market.

What happens instead is private entities take public research and capture it almost entirely in as few hands as possible.

In short, the loss of civic pride and shared responsibility to society has created the nickel and dime you to death capitalism we are seeing in the rise today. Externalization of all costs possible and capture as much profit as possible. No thought to second order effects or how the system that is being dodged to contribute back to gave way for the ability for people to so grossly take advantage of it in the first place

Labor, FOSS... can you not imagine anything besides wealthy people creating artificial scarcity to force others to work for them?

Edit: if you don't think this is true, look at the history of truly any country and see what happens when subsistence farmers and indigenous communities refuse to work for capitalists

Think of all the people who solved problems before/outside of typical capitalism. I guess more of those people wouldn't hurt to have right now to counter-balance the shift to hyper-capitalism that is ongoing.

BRB, waiting for capitalists to solve the housing and healthcare crisis, shouldn't be long...