Was the internet first owned by the government and no one else?

[musicv22]

well... I heard that the Government first owned the internet and not the public a while back. Could someone please tell me about that?
But I heard that the internet that we are using now originally just belonged to the government and no one else..

 

[Rob]

the internet was developed under ARPA which was a department ran by the US Government

 

[bcnu]

Yes, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) funded the companies and universities that developed the ARPAnet, which was the foundation upon which internet protocols were developed. The physical components (packet switches, terminal access controllers) were owned by private companies and public universities, so it would be hard to say the government "owned" it. Not to mention that this was in the 1960s and is ancient history.

The "Internet" as we know it did not become "commercial" until much later, and the "web" was only invented in the early 1990s, by a Swiss engineer, which uses the Internet as a transfer mechanism.

 

[mattheww]

The internet we use today was created by Universities sharing information and then other groups got involved and it exploded.

The goverment had their own version but it died out.

 

[laughter_every_day]

The internet is not a thing that can be owned. It is software and phone lines and such and they can be owned, but not the internet itself. It was originally developed by a group of scientists for sharing information. The government was not involved in the original development except that some of the scientists used government computers as servers.