In its infancy, the Internet was originally conceived by the Department of Defense as a way to protect government communications systems in the event of a military strike. The original network, dubbed ARPANet (for the Advanced Research Projects Agency that developed it) evolved into a communications channel among contractors, military personnel, and university researchers who were contributing to ARPA projects.
The network employed a set of standard protocols to create an effective way for these people to communicate and share data with each other.
ARPAnet's popularity continued to spread among researchers, and in the 1980's the National Science Foundation, whose NSFNet, linked several high speed computers, took charge of the what had come to be known as the Internet.
By the late 1980's, thousands of cooperating networks were participating in the Internet.
In 1991, the U.S. High Performance Computing Act established the NREN (National Research & Education Network). NREN's goal was to develop and maintain high-speed networks for research and education, and to investigate commercial uses for the Internet.
The rest, as they say, is history in the making. The Internet has been improved through the developments of such services as Gopher and the World Wide Web.
Even though the Internet is predominantly thought of as a research oriented network, it continues to grow as an informational, creative, and commercial resource every day and all over the world.
Who Pays for the Internet?
There is no clear answer to this question because the Internet is not one "thing", it's many things. No one central agency exists that charges individual Internet users. Rather, individuals and institutions who use the Internet pay a local or regional Internet service provider for their share of services. And in turn, those smaller Internet service providers might purchase services from an even larger network. So basically, everyone who uses the Internet in some way pays for part of it.