planned economy usually happens in repressive regimes.
Prior to 1918, revolutionary Russia's factories were run by workers' soviets, or councils.
Workers' control was controversially scrapped when it temporarily led to rapid inflation(some workers gave themselves the bosses' salaries after kicking out the factory management) and proved to be inefficient.
The Bolshevik-Left SR coalition government decided to compensate through nationalization of the commanding heights of the economy, effectively deviating from orthodox Marxism, a key point of which was to hand over the means of production to the workers in order to create a potentially free and egalitarian society without exploiters or exploitation.
Lenin had argued prior to the October Revolution that soviets would have to appoint managers from amongst the working-class to serve as a form of iron discipline in the workplace in place of workers' control.
He further argued that possessing an educated upper-crust of working-class management was necessary in backwards Russia; at the time that many of his ideas were being formulated, Russia's education system was shoddy, and very few could read or write, let alone manage a whole factory based on democratic decision-making alone, as he argued.
The brief period of workers' control in Russia through the workers' soviets, flawed as it was, more or less proved that it was still *possible* to run a factory through collective, democratic decision-making, which by the way was a form of
democratic central planning, in which goods would be distributed in Russia based on societal need, on a scientific basis(IE through a centrally planned economy managed by the working-class, who in theory ran the state along with the peasantry through their soviets).
So no, central-planning is not a unique phenomenon that only occurs in dictatorial societies.
Russia prior to 1918 was certainly not a dictatorial society. It was considered by Russia's radicals to be, in theory, a dictatorship of the proletariat, in which the proletariat and the peasantry(these two classes made up the majority of Russia's population at the time) ran society while repressing the bourgeoisie, to keep them from rising back to power.
This is very basic stuff when it comes to Marxism.
As for the internet and it's role in central-planning, it could very well revolutionize the shop floor.
And with higher rates of education now present in most modern societies, economic problems, if any, would be far less severe under central-planning.
Local communities, through the internet, could easily request what they want the local factory councils to produce, who would produce goods based on societal need, instead of how things work now where things are based on not what we need, but want we want.