> Oh man you wanna talk about benefits? I actually don't even think the US should have given the internet to the world. It's basically been one giant gift.

You didn't give the internet to the world. The world made it by copying stuff you had no power to prevent them copying.

Also, the rest of the world had other networks, the US version (TCP/IP) just happened to win enough mindshare to replace e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coloured_Book_protocols

The UK alternative was only phased out in favour of TCP/IP after the world wide web was invented by Tim Berners-Lee while working at the famously-not-American CERN. The American attempt at the web was Gopher: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)

> An alternate reality where we didn't do that would be a reality where people would be smuggling American tech to their countries the way they did with jeans in the 80s.

Only thing we might care to smuggle (if anything) would be the software, and it's not like a DVD is hard to hide. Nobody would be smuggling out hardware, we would not need to, we would not care to. And even that's a stretch, we're also quite capable of writing our own software, sometimes you buy our companies because they're better at it than yours.

> We basically decided to make a bunch of money on the tech over the past 50 years but it's actually created a situation where our soldiers are gonna be dodging drones in the next big conflict where as if we never allowed advanced chips to proliferate around the world we would be sitting high on tech that is basically magic to the rest of the world. In hindsight I'm not sure if it was a good idea.

You say that like other countries don't make stuff. It's often the other way around, because we're as smart and capable as you, despite what you may think, and even when things have been invented "in" the US, it has often been by an immigrant who in your alternate timeline would not have gone to the US.

The chips are made by machines sold by EU companies; batteries and brushless motors? China; IMU? Japan, Germany, Taiwan; even GPS, despite the US one being the famous one, has alternatives of GLONASS (Soviet), BeiDou, and Galileo.

TBH, the only thing that America genuinely brought to the table was the interaction of the first amendment and cryptography. Insufficient cryptography, insufficient security, e-commerce remains limited.

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