“The government allowed the growth. “
You made my point. It did not take off until the feds got out of its growth. It languished for several decades wtihout any growth while the governmentcontrolled it.
And let me rephrase your comment, “The government stopped preventing its growth”. They did not “allow it”. A government cannot “allow” anything. It can only prevent.
Actually, it grew quite rapidly before then. What really spurred the growth you're thinking of, and coinciding with the government giving up as the sole backbone provider, was the invention of the WWW, the "killer app" that gave the average guy something to do in the Internet. The WWW was developed in Switzerland, so the Internet had obviously gone international.
Also spurring growth was allowing commerce on the Internet. Yes, allowing. You run it, you allow what you want. Using an Internet running under net neutrality, and still controlled by the government, companies figured out how to make a lot of money and futher expand the reasons for people to want to get an Internet connection.
Note, as I said, under net neutrality. It is net neutrality -- the neutrality of the network towards the content and services going over it -- that allowed the massive expansion of the Internet. Anybody could invent any service and know it could reach any online consumer. The little guy was suddenly on an equal playing field with the big guy. Barriers to entry in markets dropped drastically. Long established services like POTS telephone, newspapers and now cable TV could now be threatened by startup companies, or even free services.
It is this net neutrality that the telcos want to kill. It must be maintained to keep the growth and innovation going, even if that does mean the government telling the ISPs to quit trying to stifle the free flow of traffic on the Internet.