The internet or something like it would have inevitably happened at one time or another even if any one group were to have fucked up its inception.

Despite being a complex, multi-faceted technological system, unlike, say, distillation, it shares the logical quality of being something useful and practical that one culture or another would have come up with sooner or later as a consequence of previous developments and knowledge.

Expressed by Charles Fort as: "It steam engines when it's steam-engine time."

Finding a Charles Fort quote here is definitely worth an upvote, and yes, pithy way of saying it, as usual from Fort.