which is what I'd wager many think of when you say "the Internet"

I wager you'd be right, but most people are wrong.

I'm saying that everything is built on foundations that are fundamentally English and American, and this influenced even Berners-Lees's creation. HTTP and HTML were fundamentally ASCII. DNS and the WWW eventually evolved broader encoding support, but it's clearly tacked-on and awkward. All you need to do is look at URL encoding rules as proof.

I'm not saying it's right; I'm just saying there consequences of an English, American-centric design of what underlies all computer technology today is evident at all higher levels, no matter how hard we try to mask them.