Central planning never works.
I can't tell if the "central planning" you refer to with respect to consciousness is supposed to be a homunculus or an intelligent designer, but either way I disagree.
Brains are pretty well distributed, and various degrees and kinds of brain damage have shown that no specific location is an inherently privileged "command center" of the brain; [different] people have continued to be thinking people without each part of it.
Of course, it can be argued that governments don't just do investments, that they can provide services that may be impossible to obtain otherwise. But when we wonder into real investment territory (like a particular bridge), we have to be able to produce a R.O.I.
What we have to consider is that the alternative uses of the capital will contribute to economic growth and in a longer timeframe, the glamorous visible things like a space program may actually pay for themselves. Not only that, these expenditures will be self-sustaining and long lasting. Or otherwise said, money spent on space (and other visible things) without a R.O.I. is actually detracting from future growth and delaying actual practical space exploration.
In central planning, the dynamics are different. Whomever influences the planners ultimately makes the decisions. The quality of those decisions depends on your perspective and the motivation of the influencers.
In a pure capitalist model, you follow the money. Whomever has money influences the decisions.
There's no right or wrong answer. Oftentimes valuable things appear as unintended consequences of government or commercial projects.
It's hard to declare the internet to not be an example of central planning -- it was built to connect Federally funded labs at universities with Federal dollars. The labs existed to provide (indirectly or directly) research to serve defense and space (which i consider to be a subset of defense) interests.
The difference between the French thing and the Internet is that key stakeholders in the government and academia saw the potential of computer networks as a driver of commerce at an opportune time. If that conclusion was made in 1978, we'd have the French thing on a terminal leased from AT&T or a baby bell.
Equating a telecom system to a railroad, bridge, road, etc from a government POV was a big leap -- but the timing was probably more important and less obvious.
Also "central planning" is too broad a stroke. Are we talking about national central planning, i.e. government programs or are we also going to include central planning in corporate hierarchies, household hierarchies, software design or even things like activities directors in retirement facilities. All valid ways of describing centralized planning. Centralized planning is neither big nor small, you can have it at almost any level & it's success depends on the people involved. Which is why the vague statement made by the OP is somewhat confusing.
But the Internet was the spin-off of a centrally planned government network. I am not sure it's accurate to say the failure of "competing" services was due to the failures of central planning, but more related to the onward march of technology(cheaper & faster). Even now the Internet is far from decentralized & some of the biggest services on the Internet are centralized and proprietary.
Concepts like ICANN, root DNS servers, Tier 1 providers & Client/Server... Yes all very decentralized concepts..mmm hmmm.
Just because the government didn't initially plan for the Internet to envelop our lives 30 years later, doesn't mean that it wasn't a successful centrally planned project that benefited society. Most things are centrally planned. Much of private industry relies on centralized chains of command. I am not sure what the OPs point was, but seemed more like a veiled jab that suggested centralized government programs are always failures. When the facts are that Minitel shouldn't be classified as a failure & the Internet shouldn't be classified as a poster child for decentralized initiatives.
Which all tend to eventually fail. The Source, CompuServe, Delphi, AOL, all failed.
Second, I was speaking about things like ICANN, root DNS servers, Tier 1 providers & Client/Server architecture as being non-decentralized. Additionally some of the biggest services on the Internet are indeed centralized. Google, Facebook, iTunes. ISP options have also been drastically reduced over the last two decades.
That doesn't really have anything to do with the Internet being centrally planned or not. It was just planned to be more open than those other services.
Central planning probably gets harder the more humans want to cooperate and market mechanisms are very likely superior in those situations but that doesn’t mean that central planning doesn’t work.
But if you ignore the arguments about who funded what there are lots of aspects of Minitel that are interesting because it helped to kick off the wide use of smart cards, the underlying network was packet switched (X.25) and the servers handling Minitel were distributed through the network (so service providers ran their own services).
It wouldn't view Minitel as a failure, however, just because it was replaced by the web. The French were years (probably 10) ahead of the rest of the world in terms of electronic communication and commerce. They had a large internal market online in the 1980s handling a huge amount of commerce.
I would consider the Minitel as a success of central planning. 20 years of e-economy and quite a lot of money moving from French citizen to French corporations or smaller businesses.