Let's just disagree. I really don't see it your way. Businesses didn't just setup websites. The entirety of the modern internet (and web) in most countries was built privately. You would not enjoy a DSL connection today without quite literally fortunes having been put on the line to develop, install, run and sell the infrastructure.

My key point is that, if we are talking CERN and the WWW, this was not, in any way a program that originated by any one government. It was scientists trying to solve a problem. No politician devised, specified, directed, funded and pushed for the development of the WWW at CERN. It just happened because they were trying to improve the way they communicated with each other.

To me when someone say something akin to "the public sector created the WWW" or "the/a government created the WWW" it means something very different than scientist at a research organization who were trying to fix some problems and happen to create something that went big. For me to attribute anything to government it must have clear genesis in government.

A perfect example of this is Obama-care. There is no imaginable way to claim that Obama-care was created by the private sector. It is a clear case of something that was created by a government and handed down to us.

Claiming that the WWW was a public sector project, a government project or something we ought to hold-up high as an example of what central planning can create is --again, my opinion-- absurd. It's like saying Linux is a centrally-planned public sector/government project because so many of the early contributors were in government-funded academic institutions. I could not envision anyone saying we owe Linux to our or any government.

In Tim Berners-Lee's own words:

"The WorldWideWeb (WWW) project aims to allow all links to be made to any information anywhere. [...] The WWW project was started to allow high energy physicists to share data, news, and documentation. We are very interested in spreading the web to other areas, and having gateway servers for other data. Collaborators welcome!"

Yes, the European Commission and other public and private entities (MIT) would join forces later on to nail down protocols and such things in order to make ensure interoperability. Again, a natural effect. In fact, you could have taken government entirely out of the picture and this standardization would have probably happened just the same as universities and research labs got together to make the system work more universally. It's the story of computing. There are many standards in a myriad of industries that were developed ad-hoc at first and later refined and ratified by key commercial and non-commercial players in the industry.

The history of the Internet --as distinct from the WWW which one could think of as an application that runs on top of the Internet-- is a little more convoluted. Depending on how you want to interpret things it took thirty to forty years for the Internet to surface from inception in 1960/1970 in a form that enabled the WWW to be developed.

The primary motivator and driver for ARPANET had nothing whatsoever to do with us being able to buy books online. It was a purely military project from the start that mutated into civilian use at one point. No consumer-side foresight existed in its development at all. That's why it is a bit disingenuous to credit the US government with the creation of what we call the Internet today.

Much like civilian aviation had its roots in military aviation, the roots of what we call the Internet today are in military technology.

It would be insane to say that the government, in a centrally-planned sort of way, invented civilian aviation. Just the same, I don't think it is fair to credit government or the public sector with the creation and development of the modern civilian Internet. These are vastly different things.

The scary proposition here is that we ought to support every military initiative because they might develop into amazingly useful civilian projects in the future. I fundamentally reject the idea that we have to continually develop better killing tools in order to derive peace-time benefits.

I could be wrong.

The Wikipedia page on the history of the Internet is well worth reading:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet

So is this timeline:

http://www.zakon.org/robert/internet/timeline/