OMNI-thread posting:

It's probably unseemly for a guy who grew up in SoCal to defend a Texan but...

Jaws is right. The ability to actually run the internet (a WAN) was funded by US taxpayers and developed by ARPANET. I first logged on "the internet" in 1975 -- whilst Mr. Berners-Lee was still chasing tail (or whatever) at Queen's College (Catman -- isn't that in NYC??)...

Mr. Berners-Lee et al were instrumental in developing the tools to let the common man clog the bandwidths of the world and have so many wonderfully slow-loading pages full of ludicrous animations and graphics! Of course it also gave us FT and how could we possibly survive without that?!

Having said all that:

"Now see what happens when two fine European countries - The UK and Switzerland - combine their efforts!" Here here! We need lots more of that and a lot less of the garbage we see in so many parts of the world...

And with that, onefreeman exits stage left --