Darpa invented the internet, long before AOL. Military funding created the internet ,not home hobbyists.
Most tech comes from research that is funded by organizations, because they can afford to pay a guy to do it.
Even if you disagree with that, you shouldn't disagree that tech eventually disperses to individuals, like phones, like cars, like 3D printers. This dramatically reduces the power of organizations compared to individuals.
Surveillance, cameras, etc., is the same thing. I can mount cameras on my house and record 24/7 on my HDD for less than $100. Not so long ago, only well funded organizations could afford such surveillance systems.
We can hurry it along, if we want to, and I reckon we should want to.
All i'm saying is that the free market was going to create a network that would have been more decentralyzed than the darpa internet. And it would have morphed into a more versatile system. But we'll never know because they took over and never let us figure it out. The free market and the innovation of the crowd will always do a better job than the gov't. If they had never forced us to use their already developed network, we would have come up with something better and always improving. It would have been perhaps a complex and confusing network, but computers can handle that and keep it in the background and you would never have noticed it. And I'm pretty sure we would have never seen anything like Facebook.
Oh by the way, I was trying to remember which network I was on in those day, it was CompuServe. Do you remember than name? They ended up being taken over by one company and then they got taken over and so on, and so on.