This is really interesting! I ran into hints of this when I was doing the lit review for my dissertation. Not so much the internet part, but there was a RAND corporation memo on the Five-Year Plan of 1970 that mentioned the goal of placing all industrial production under rational, automatic control. I suppose I could have inferred an internet from that, but I was more interested in the idea that they wanted to run their economy with a giant linear program. (Which is an idea that was also briefly popular in the U.S. during the late 1940s and early 50s.)