I am not sure if this is still true. But isn't the backbone of internet or core routers government owned and developed?
Ok, here we go. Some day I should write this up as an article. But then I'd have to look up the dates of the things that happened before I got into it, to phooy.
Various colleges and universities used DARPA money in their development of the underlying protocols that fleshed out into what we know as TCP/IP. The National Science Foundation then ran what we know and love as the Internet, organizing the routing, and determing the rules under which organizations were allowed to connect. For instance, only non-commercial traffic was allowed. That didn't stop college students from making USEnet historic for its chaotic content.
There were only a couple (I'm certain of two, MetroAreaExchange-West and MAE-East) located at the NASA facilities of Goddard and Ames, where the various organizations came together to reach everyone else. This is the root of AlGore's "Information Superhighway", where the government would run the "backbone", and anyone wanting to connect to the 'Net would have to go through one of the 6 exchange points located around the country. By law.
After Clinton/Gore won in 1992, before they took office, the NSF did the one act of divestiture of power by government that I have ever witnessed: They declared access to the exchanges open, removed the non-commercial traffic restriction, and opened the routing tables so that each company connecting could route traffic to anyone else who agreed to route with them.
The hardware routers at the time were
barely able to handle this. The NSF had managed it through dual RS6000 mini-computers on each exchange just to generate the routing tables, much less carry traffic. But Cisco made their fortune by improving their hardware fast enough to be able be "first to market" over the course of several years.
The company that had held the NSF contract to carry backbone traffic between the exchanges found itself very quickly abandoned by customers who now had the choice of backbone providers, to MCI, AT&T, Sprint (sprint SUCKS) and many others. This diversity of provider has created an environment where the dream of "a network that would survive a nuclear war" finally came true.
At the same time, the diversity of protocols and services exploded. Email still uses SMTP, but there are very few places that still use FTP, and WAIS and GOPHER have been buried by HTML and Google. Ah yes, Playboy.com was free once upon a time...
So the last time the "government" had anything to do with routing was 1992, and in the 5 years after that the routing protocols went through such massive reorganization and development that there really is nothing left of what government had been doing. It was only after government threw open the system that the entire 'Net that we know now became possible. All that government's control of the net did was retard its progress for a decade, at least.
Keep in mind that TCP/IP was never the only protocol available. It just was the most flexible, and it was the one that was never "owned" by any one organization unlike competitors like DECnet or NetBUI. The RFCs which document the basic protocols of the 'Net are the pinnacle of OpenSource, available for anyone to read, utilize, build upon. Build to that standard, and communicate with anyone else.