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DARPA just funds research. There's no reason that has to be done through the military, that's just the way it is right now. If DARPA had the same funds but was part of the department of transportation or something, we still would have gotten the internet.

We still need defense research, but the fact that a lot of our advancements have come through the military doesn't mean that's the only way it can happen.

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Wasn't ARPANET started as a project where individual communication nodes could fail, and the message could still arrive? Military technology generally needs to be reliable, which makes it a good fit for civilian use as well. Of course, there are plenty of aspects of military technology that isn't as necessary in civilian life.

It was originally an internal tool for ARPA researchers to collaborate. It had very little to do with the military, and ARPA scientists were not the only ones working on something like this. It absolutely would have happened somewhere else around the same time if the defense department wasn't interested.

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