The Internet Was Built With Public Money

Its Private Gatekeepers Must Answer to the Public.

By Cliff Potts | WPS News

BAYBAY CITY, LEYTE, Philippines, July 27, 2026 — 0005 PhST

The European Union’s decision to fine Google €890 million—approximately US$1 billion—is more than another regulatory dispute between Brussels and an enormously profitable American corporation. It raises a question governments should have confronted decades ago: How did private companies acquire the power to determine who may be found, heard, read, and economically successful on a communications system built substantially with public money?

The European Commission imposed €460 million of the penalty because Google allegedly favored its own shopping, hotel, flight, and other commercial services in search results. Another €430 million concerned Google Play restrictions that prevented application developers from freely directing customers toward less expensive purchasing options outside Google’s store (European Commission, 2026; Reuters, 2026).

Google disputes the European findings and may challenge the penalties. However, the larger issue is not whether one particular search-result design was convenient or whether a developer signed a contract containing restrictive terms. The issue is whether a corporation that controls a primary gateway to information should be permitted to use that position to benefit its own businesses and disadvantage smaller competitors.

Google is not merely another website competing for attention. It operates infrastructure that determines whether millions of other websites receive attention at all.

The public built the foundation

The internet was not created in a Silicon Valley garage.

Its foundations emerged from decades of publicly funded research, including work by the U.S. Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency and the National Science Foundation. NSFNET became the principal American internet backbone, growing from approximately 2,000 connected computers in 1986 to more than 2 million by 1993. The National Science Foundation retired that publicly supported backbone in 1995 as commercial internet services expanded (National Science Foundation, n.d.).

Private companies subsequently invested enormous amounts in fiber-optic networks, cellular systems, data centers, software, cloud computing, and consumer services. That investment should not be dismissed. Nevertheless, it was built upon protocols, research, networks, and technical knowledge created with substantial support from American taxpayers, public universities, government laboratories, and publicly funded researchers.

Tor offers another instructive example.

The onion-routing research that eventually produced Tor began at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. The technology was designed to permit private communication across public networks by passing encrypted traffic through multiple relays. Its developers later released the software publicly, and the independent Tor Project eventually assumed responsibility for its continued development (Tor Project, n.d.).

That public release was not merely charity. An anonymity network used only by government personnel would provide little anonymity because participation itself could identify a user as a government agent. A broad civilian network provided the crowd in which official users could disappear. At the same time, the technology became useful to journalists, dissidents, whistleblowers, researchers, abuse survivors, and people living under censorship.

Tor demonstrates that publicly financed technology can remain broadly available as civic infrastructure rather than becoming a privately controlled tollbooth.

Private companies became private governments

The problem is not that businesses were permitted to operate online. Commercial participation helped transform a specialized research network into a global communications system.

The problem is that elected governments allowed a handful of businesses to become the internet’s unelected governments.

Google influences what information people discover. Meta determines which publishers and creators reach audiences who have already chosen to follow them. Apple and Google control access to most mobile application users. Major cloud providers control systems upon which businesses, governments, publishers, and public services increasingly depend.

These corporations establish rules, impose penalties, change algorithms, restrict distribution, collect information, and decide which competing services are visible. Their decisions can destroy a small business or independent publication without a hearing, explanation, meaningful appeal, or democratic accountability.

An independent publisher such as WPS News does not need to be personally targeted to be harmed. A search company can reduce traffic to thousands of publishers simultaneously by changing an algorithm, placing its own services above independent results, or using artificial intelligence to answer questions directly without sending readers to the original reporting.

The injury may be impersonal, but it is still real.

A publisher can conduct research, produce original work, maintain a website, follow technical recommendations, and publish consistently—only to discover that access to readers depends upon machinery controlled by companies that may operate competing news, advertising, video, artificial-intelligence, or information services.

That is not an open marketplace. It is economic dependence upon a gatekeeper.

Regulation is not theft

Corporate defenders frequently describe regulation as government interference with private enterprise. That description ignores both the public origin of the network and the power these companies now exercise over others.

The public financed much of the road. Private companies built businesses beside it, improved portions of it, and created useful vehicles for traveling upon it. They were then allowed to erect tollbooths, redirect traffic toward their own stores, and decide which smaller operators could place signs along the highway.

Elected officials have every right—and a public duty—to question that arrangement.

The European Union’s Digital Markets Act identifies exceptionally powerful technology companies as “gatekeepers” and subjects them to requirements intended to make digital markets fairer and more contestable. The law is explicitly designed to prevent dominant platforms from using control of essential services to suppress competition (European Commission, n.d.).

The €890 million penalty will not dismantle Google, democratize the internet, or guarantee traffic for independent publishers. Google can absorb a billion-dollar fine more easily than almost any small competitor can absorb a bad month.

Meaningful regulation must therefore do more than collect money. It must change behavior.

Dominant search services should not secretly favor their own commercial operations. Application stores should not prevent developers from informing customers about alternatives. Ranking systems that determine economic survival require greater transparency. Publishers should have enforceable rights concerning how their work is copied, summarized, indexed, and used to train or operate artificial-intelligence systems.

Governments did not spend decades creating a global communications network so that several corporations could privately determine who deserves access to the public.

American taxpayers paid for the foundation. Their parents paid for it. Their institutions built it. Their elected representatives are entitled to demand that the businesses occupying its most powerful gateways operate fairly.

The internet may no longer be publicly owned in any simple legal or physical sense. But it remains a public highway in function, necessity, and origin.

The public has every right to insist that its gatekeepers answer to the people traveling upon it.

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References

European Commission. (2026). Digital Markets Act enforcement concerning Google Search and Google Play.

European Commission. (n.d.). Digital Markets Act: Ensuring fair and contestable digital markets.

National Science Foundation. (n.d.). Birth of the commercial internet.

Reuters. (2026, July 23). Google hit with $1 billion EU fine in first penalties under landmark rules.

Tor Project. (n.d.). History of Tor and onion routing.