You're so right, good thing the internet (created by a people at a government institution) exists for us to have this discussion.
Here I think you meant your comment as a final unavoidable contradiction to the GPs post, but I recall reading some lore on a father of the internet steering the RFC process while a government branch was working on another standard meant to be primary. (I'd look it up but I'm on my mobile.) So I doubt we can say it was more the government institution rather than the will of the builders which led to the internet which is more in line with the GP and doesn't take away from the idea that their positions made their work possible.
But, really, I was responding to the parent's 'By contrast, not as many examples of [institutions] creating it.' The environment provided by institutions (whether it's a small company or a large facility) have created a great many things throughout history.
We all want to think individuals are what it's all about, but individuals don't exist outside their surroundings and influences.
The "internet" that the government created would be nothing without the private organizations that actually built it. When did the government start Cisco? Google? USR? Even the early iterations of the internet were built by private companies. It's more that the government was the first buyer of this type of technology.
Edit: The idea that the government can take responsibility for the internet is gigantic hubris. In fact it's governments that are continuing to destroy what the internet has become.
ARPANET didn't resemble anything close to the internet in it's current incarnation. Thank the government that you have a macbook to use, because they built ENIAC!
sure there were a lot of those. Still, for more than 20 years during 1970-90s private sector largely discarded ARPANet mutating into Internet as an academic toy. All while TCP/IP was invented by Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn at Stanford and HTML by Tim Berners Lee at CERN. Yup, two largely government-funded organisations again.