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I'll give you some government funded counter examples: space flight, the Internet, WWW.

space flight - liquid fuel rockets were privately developed before the government got involved, both in the US and Germany.

internet - the first internet was the telegraphy network, privately developed.

www - is not the first internet. BIX, Prodigy, CompuServe, MCIMail, RBBS, Timenet, etc.

I think there is nuance and some validity to all three of your examples examples. But I'll note only that the internet, a packet switched network, is fundamentally different than the telegraph network, which was circuit switched.

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