[greenyoda]

The fact that the government funded the research behind ARPANET (the precursor of the modern internet) doesn't imply that it wouldn't have happened without government funding. For example, the early commercial dial-up service providers like AOL or MCI Mail could have evolved into a global network even if there were no ARPANET. Unix systems were exchanging e-mail and net news across the world independently of ARPANET for many years. So were IBM mainframes at universities, via BITNET. The communications infrastructure that the ARPANET used -- leased long-distance phone lines -- was available to anybody who had the money to lease them. There were commercially developed network protocols (e.g., SNA from IBM or DECNET from DEC) and their associated networking hardware that could have been used as alternatives to TCP/IP and IMPs. And the operating systems that ran on the ARPANET hosts were commercially developed (TOPS-20 from DEC, Unix from AT&T, etc.).