It depends on what condition the internet was in. If it was like the 90s or early 2000s internet, it would have accelerated the civil rights movement. The sanitized internet of today would have killed it.
Acutally, it was ARPANET. Pieces of the internet existed in the 1970's, but nothing like what we think of today as the "Internet". The backbone of the internet, the TCP/IP protocol, wasn't even fully implemented until "Flag Day" (January 1st, 1983) [Flag Day is actually used in IT to mean something completely different from the actual calendar day]. That was the first official day the "Internet" came online. Before that day the "Internet" was considered to be a prototype.
The internet, pre-WWW, only became available to the wider public starting in the 1980's as an off=shoot of excess capacity on business links being available outside of business hours and the companies leasing the lines wanting to find an additional source or revenue. What most people today think of as the "Internet" is based off of the WWW and derivatives there of which didn't exist until the early 1990's in a very primitive form. Even then, the protocols for networking weren't hammered down. TCP/IP was used for the internet, but business networks typically used different protocols, such as IPX/SPX. Everyone finally agreed to use TCP/IP as THE networking protocol by the mid-90's. Don't even get me started on the streams vs. sockets arguments of the mid-90's.
