I think the people who remember the (proto-)Internet being "a US only thing" are hardly more than a few hands full. Because that would have been when there were

I think the people who remember the (proto-)Internet being "a US only thing" are hardly more than a few hands full. Because that would have been when there were maybe a few dozen servers or so, exclusively in either military installations or educational institutions. (And, also, well before it was called "Internet".) When the Internet went transnational, it was more or less universities-only for quite some time. Still not many people around, then. People mostly used English as a language, for the simple reason that nearly everybody knows it. It's just the simplest and most sensible option. When the Internet finally really entered the public consciousness in the mid-90's - quite a bit after the first web server outside of Europe was set up in Stanford in 1991 - it had been a transnational thing for longer than not.