The internet was born as a military R&D program and remains one today. What is the "free" web? What is the "free" structure of the internet? I assume "free" is

The internet was born as a military R&D program and remains one today. What is the "free" web? What is the "free" structure of the internet? I assume "free" is not used here to mean "fault-tolerant" or "capable of routing around failed nodes"