Why do Americans think satellites are required for Internet to function?

To be fair, most internet connections don’t require climbing Icelandic volcanoes.

The idea that satellites would be involved goes back to at least the 1960s. In 1964 David Sarnoff (head of RCA) predicted: “The computer will become the hub of a vast network of remote data stations and information banks feeding into the machine at a transmission rate of a billion or more bits of information a second. Laser channels will vastly increase both data capacity and the speeds with which it will be transmitted. Eventually, a global communications network handling voice, data and facsimile will instantly link man to machine–or machine to machine–by land, air, underwater, and space circuits. [The computer] will affect man’s ways of thinking, his means of education, his relationship to his physical and social environment, and it will alter his ways of living… [Before the end of this century, these forces] will coalesce into what unquestionably will become the greatest adventure of the human mind.”

relevant news story, spacex launching more satellites for it’s network: