Who Really Built the Internet, And Who Is Running It Now

Technology, humanity, and who made who

There is an assumption baked into most accounts of the Internet's history. It runs something like this: the Internet was invented in America, the Web was built in Europe, the commercial digital economy was created in Silicon Valley, and everyone else eventually joined in. The story is Western in its geography, Anglo-American in its protagonists, and largely told from the perspective of the people who were there at the beginning.

It is not wrong, exactly. But it is incomplete in ways that matter and the incompleteness is becoming harder to ignore as the digital landscape of 2026 looks increasingly different from the one that story describes.

The Part of the Story We Don't Often Tell

Here is something that does not appear in most English-language accounts of the Internet's origins. In 1979, a South Korean engineer named Kilnam Chon returned to Seoul after completing his PhD at UCLA, where he had studied under Leonard Kleinrock, the man who oversaw the team that sent the very first message across ARPANET. Chon came home convinced that computer networking was going to transform the world, and he spent years trying to persuade a government that could not see the point. For the South Korean government of the early 1980s, a computer was a physical object you could manufacture and export. A network was an abstraction. What were you selling?

Chon eventually succeeded. In 1982, South Korea built SDN, the Software Development Network, and one of the first TCP/IP networks outside North America. In the same period, Japan was building JUNET, Australia had already launched ACSnet, India was developing ERNET. These were not pale imitations of ARPANET. They were independent parallel efforts, built by engineers who understood what networked computing could do and were determined to bring it to their countries without waiting for an invitation from Washington.

The Internet's history is genuinely global from its earliest years. The foundational architecture was American. But the people who adopted it, extended it, and made it work across Asia were doing something creative and consequential, not merely derivative. It is an important part of the story and it is largely absent from the histories that most of us read.

And Then Something Shifted

For the first two decades of the commercial Internet, the traffic largely ran in one direction. Western platforms expanded east. Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple built global empires from Silicon Valley. Asian markets were important audiences, and in some cases, South Korea's extraordinary broadband infrastructure, Japan's mobile internet culture, China's rapidly growing online economy , they were early adopters and sophisticated users. But the architectural decisions, the platform models, the business logic: these were overwhelmingly Western in origin.

Then something shifted.

China, which had spent the 1990s and early 2000s building the Great Firewall precisely to avoid depending on Western platform architecture, had in the process created the conditions for a different kind of digital ecosystem to develop. WeChat, Weibo, Baidu, Alibaba, and ultimately TikTok grew in a protected environment where Western competitors could not operate. The result, over time, was platforms that in several cases were more sophisticated than their Western counterparts , not despite the isolation, but partly because of it.

WeChat is the most striking example. It is a super-app: a single application that contains social messaging, payments, e-commerce, transport booking, food delivery, civic services, and a dozen other functions, all integrated so completely that operating daily life in China without it is practically impossible. No Western platform has achieved anything like this integration. Facebook tried, and largely failed. Apple Pay and Google Pay are shadows of what WeChat Wallet does. The super-app model that Silicon Valley has been discussing for years is something ByteDance, Tencent, and Alibaba actually built, in China, for China, and increasingly for the world.

TikTok and the Moment Everything Changed

TikTok is China's first genuinely global application. It has outperformed every Western competitor it has encountered. It did not do this by copying the Facebook model or the Twitter model. It did something architecturally different: it made the recommendation algorithm (not the social graph) the core of the product. You do not need to follow anyone on TikTok for it to show you content you cannot stop watching. The algorithm learns from behaviour rather than declared relationships. It is behaviourally smarter, and more psychologically sophisticated, than anything the Western platforms built first.

The US government's response has been instructive. In April 2024, Congress passed legislation ordering ByteDance, TikTok's Chinese parent company, to divest its US operations or face a ban. The Supreme Court upheld the law in January 2025. The arguments were urgent and bipartisan: that an algorithm controlling the information environment of 170 million Americans could be weaponised by the Chinese state to harvest data, spread propaganda, and manipulate political opinion.

Here is the irony that nobody in Washington seemed to notice, or at least to say out loud: these are precisely the arguments that critics of Facebook, Google, and Twitter had been making about American platforms for years, to largely insufficient effect. The claim that platform architecture is political, that algorithms can shape democratic discourse, that the ownership of an information environment is a question of power, all of this was Shoshana Zuboff's argument in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019), and Lawrence Lessig's argument in Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (1999), and Langdon Winner's argument in Do Artifacts Have Politics? (1980). The US political system largely declined to act on those arguments when they applied to domestic platforms. It took a Chinese competitor to make the argument feel urgent.

So Is the East Using Technology Better?

This is the question my own book asks — Well… How Did We Get Here?

In specific and important respects: yes. South Korea and Japan built broadband infrastructure faster and more comprehensively than the United States in the late 1990s and 2000s, in part because their governments treated connectivity as national infrastructure rather than leaving it entirely to market competition. China built a digital payments system — through WeChat Pay and Alipay, that is decades ahead of anything available in most Western countries. ByteDance built a recommendation algorithm that is, by most objective measures of engagement and retention, more effective than anything Facebook or Google has produced.

If the measure is commercial and social penetration, technical sophistication, and speed of adoption, the East is, in important areas, ahead. If the measure is individual privacy, freedom of expression, democratic accountability, and the separation of platform power from state power, the picture looks very different. China's digital infrastructure is simultaneously the most integrated and the most politically controlled in the world. The Great Firewall and the social credit system are Winner's politics of artifacts deployed in the service of an authoritarian state. The super-app is both a technological marvel and a surveillance instrument of extraordinary completeness.

The honest answer, then, is that neither East nor West has found a satisfactory answer to the question of how powerful digital platforms should be governed in the interests of ordinary people. The West built platforms that serve commercial interests over democratic ones. The East built platforms that serve state interests over individual ones. Different failures, but failures nonetheless.

What This Means for the Argument

My book Well… How Did We Get Here? is about technological determinism: the question of whether technology shapes society, or whether society shapes technology. The TikTok story adds a dimension to that debate that the original formulation did not fully anticipate.

It is not just a question of whether human beings are shaping their tools or being shaped by them. It is a question of which human beings, with whose values, making choices that affect everyone. The architectural decisions that shaped the Western Internet were made in California and Massachusetts and Geneva, by people with specific cultural assumptions, commercial interests, and political blind spots. The architectural decisions that shaped China's internet were made in Beijing and Shenzhen, by people with very different assumptions, interests, and blind spots.

And now those two architectures are competing for the world's attention — sometimes in the same device, on the same screen, in the same pocket.

The next phase of the technological determinism debate will be the most explicitly geopolitical one yet. Not just who shapes the technology within a society, but which societies shape the technology for the world. The platforms encode values. The values are contested. And the contest has never been more consequential.

Well… How Did We Get Here?

That is the question. The answer, it turns out, is being written in several languages simultaneously.