Many networks were being developed in parallel, so I am not sure how you can say that the idea of interconnecting them would never have come up. And most of the

Many networks were being developed in parallel, so I am not sure how you can say that the idea of interconnecting them would never have come up. And most of the initial network designs (including ARPANET btw) were very much inspired by a design coming from the NPL in the UK (a metrology institute.. very much not military). So what you meant to say was that without basic research institutes like NPL or CERN the internet as we know it today would not exist. However there are things that just evolve on their own once the time is right and all the necessary ingredients (computers, networks and already existing backbone service to use) are around. Just like the computer you have parallel evolution with multiple different seeds. So I think even without NPL or CERN we would have something like the internet today, but the underlying protocols and formats might look completely different. And don't forget about Bulletin Boards (BBS) that happened slightly later somewhat independent of all those academic efforts (and not forming packet-switched networks at all initially, but with high-latency packet forwarding being added later on for email and sending binaries between different sites). This could also have served as a seed to whatever we would be using today.