The deep lore is that most of the Internet's organizational structure was (deliberately) set up to be independent of the ITU, which was seen was captured by gov

The deep lore is that most of the Internet's organizational structure was (deliberately) set up to be independent of the ITU, which was seen was captured by governments (including many authoritarian governments) and the telcos, which were at that time deeply opposed to the philosophy and practicalities of the Net. If you don't know much about the ITU it's because they lost that struggle. It's surprisingly hard to find links to this! You can get a flavor of it from this piece from 1996 https://www.wired.com/1996/10/atm-3/?gad_source=1 https://www.wired.com/1996/10/atm-3/?gad_source=1