That's true. The free market was mostly [1] absent from the research into packet switching in the 1960s, the actual deployment in 1969 of the packet-switched network that became the internet, the invention of email, FTP, the domain name system, the mailing list, newsgroups, IRC, the MMORPG (initially referred to as a multi-user domain or a MUD), the web, webmail, the blog, the RSS feed, the wiki and Wikipedia, but, yeah, starting about 1987, profit-motivated ISPs started slowly to appear that offered access to the internet to organizations and individuals.
1: I use the qualifier "mostly" because the government did farm out most research and engineering tasks to a handful of for-profit companies (Bolt Beranak Newman, the Mitre Corporation, SRI International) that specialized in governmental contracts.
That may be true. But, the Internet existed because of massive multi-decade investment from folks without a profit motive. All of the fundamental Internet protocols were created through those organizations.
Look at what capitalism gave us as an Internet like experience: compuserve, aol, etc. Those were all horrible closed wall systems.
But there are many massive investments at the academic and government research level that lead to nothing directly useful for consumers due to lack of investment interests in bringing it to market. Just look at the next generation Internet architectures that go nowhere. You can't ignore economics.
1: I use the qualifier "mostly" because the government did farm out most research and engineering tasks to a handful of for-profit companies (Bolt Beranak Newman, the Mitre Corporation, SRI International) that specialized in governmental contracts.