Charles Cooper for CNet:

On Monday, former Wall Street Journal publisher Gordon Crovitz offered a decidedly revisionist take with a column titled, “Who Really Invented the Internet?” In the piece, Crovitz cast doubt on the assertion that the U.S. government deserved credit for helping create the Internet. He described the claim as an urban myth. Instead, Crovitz, who said that Xerox deserves the credit, refracted the question through a different lens: “It’s important to understand the history of the Internet because it’s too often wrongly cited to justify big government,” he wrote.

Vint Cerf was actually there at the time and helped develop the TCP/IP protocol that still makes the Internet work to this day – with the help of government research grants.

He says unequivocally that the government was vital in the development of the modern Internet:

The U.S. government, including ARPA, NSF, DOE, NASA among others absolutely facilitated, underwrote, and pioneered the development of the Internet. The private sector engaged around 12 years into the program (about 1984-85) and was very much involved in powering the spread of the system. But none of this would have happened without this research support.