At this point I'm confident I don't want there to be "a metaverse" at all, because under our current social and cultural systems, I am confident it will be very very bad no matter who owns it.
This is the sad reality. Our society is simply not structured to protect the end-users of any such service in any meaningful way. Our political and ethical leaders are simply too embedded with selfish interests. The Metaverse will be a fleece the customer engine, with the rate and manner it is developing.
So I might have a less optimistic analysis of the plus/minus of the internet, but more importantly, I think it was created under very different circumstances, in it's birth-years, by actors with different interests, values, and goals -- than the "metaverse" will be. The metaverse will be much worse.
The internet network and it's forbears was funded largely by the US DoD (not the army specifically I don't think?) (and as a huge portion of academic computer science continues to be, btw), but most of the people involved in creating the internet and the things built on top of it, technologically and socially, including those allocating significant material resources to it's development, were not in fact military personnel (let alone in the army specifically?).
What I meant is that the people involved in building it were focused on things other than making money. (This may be hard to believe, that any human endeavor can take place except motivated by extreme profits, but it's the case). They were also not, by and large on the whole, especially motivated by military advantage, although some may have been, including some of the funders. But it was not in fact, largely, built as a national-security-focused or military/militarized network (sure, subsets of it were, there was a MILNET; it was a part of ARPANET and later separated from it, which shows that it was not the whole); nor was it built originally as a giant surveillance system for the purposes of commerce and profit (or law enforcement).
Context clues lead me to believe the person you're replying to probably means more of the people who created the early world wide web (nerdy tech folks), and less so the people who created the technical pieces of the internet.
Our current systems have made me seriously consider the need for a real-life Butlerian jihad under which all computer technology would be banned, because humans simply aren't ready for computers yet.
