[neom]

I guess what you're trying to do is ascribe some value to HTTP? Difficult thought experiment imo. Never the less: Let's say this ubiquitous protocol was mystically developed and owned by a private entity. I suppose the closest parallels in terms of direct commercialization would be Oracle or RedHat. If you wanted to play out that hypothetical you'd either have people buy into a license to your protocol somehow, adoption might be difficult, you could let everyone adopt it without enforcing some type of license, then you'd retroactively try to strongarm the project, you'd likely end up with a Joyent Node / IO js situation where someone forked it and that became the thing.

All of that is to say, HTTP is effectively infinitely valuable to society at this point, and it's so valuable precisely because it was never directly commercialized.