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DARPA then contracted with BBN Technologies, Stanford University, and the University College London to develop operational versions of the protocol on different hardware platforms. Four versions were developed: TCP v1, TCP v2, TCP v3 and IP v3, and TCP/IP v4. The last protocol is still in use today.

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IBM, AT&T and DEC were the first major corporations to adopt TCP/IP, despite having competing internal protocols

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Xerox Network Services (XNS) is a protocol suite developed by Xerox within the Xerox Network Systems Architecture. It provided general purpose network communications, internetwork routing and packet delivery, including higher level functions such as a reliable stream, and remote procedure calls. XNS predated and influenced the development of the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) networking model.

XNS was developed by the Xerox Systems Development Department (later known as the Xerox Office Systems Division) in the early 1980s, based heavily on Xerox Parc's earlier (and extremely influential) PARC Universal Packet (PUP) protocol suite done there in the late 1970s; some of the protocols in the XNS suite were lightly modified versions of the ones in the PUP suite. XNS was intended to be a commercial descendant of the research/development oriented PUP. The protocol suite specifications were placed in the public domain.

Being in the public domain, XNS became a canonical local area networking protocol in the 1980s, copied to various degrees by practically all networking systems in use into the 1990s. It had little impact on TCP/IP, however, which was designed earlier. During the 1980s XNS was used by 3Com and, with modifications, by a number of other commercial systems which became more common than XNS itself, including Ungermann-Bass Net/One, Novell NetWare, and Banyan VINES.

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Big Tech was created with publicly developed technology.

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Big Tech’s services have become a necessity in modern society.

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They’re at or near monopoly status – and moving fast.

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They abuse their power.

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They got there with our help.

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The real “commodity� is us.

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Our privacy is dying … or already dead.

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Freedom of information is at risk.

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The free market could become even less free.

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They could hijack the future.

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Theory Five - Ethernet and Xerox Palo Alto

And then we come to the theory advanced by the person who headed the Arpanet project itself, Bob Taylor. Quoting Bob,

"I believe the first internet was created at Xerox PARC, circa '75, when we connected, via PUP, the Ethernet with the ARPAnet. PUP (PARC Universal Protocol) was instrumental later in defining TCP.

For the internet to grow, it also needed a networked personal computer, a graphical user interface with WYSIWYG properties, modern word processing, and desktop publishing. These, along with the Ethernet, all came out of my lab at Xerox PARC in the '70s, and were commercialized over the next 20 years by Adobe, Apple, Cisco, Microsoft, Novell, Sun and other companies that were necessary to the development of the Internet."

John Shoch, who worked with Robert Metcalfe on the Ethernet developments at Xerox Parc, and who is at great pains to stay out of debates about who started the Internet, has concluded that PUP (the Parc Universal Protocol) was the first complete, operational set of Internet protocols. Schoch was also involved in the development of TCP/IP at a later date. To quote Shoch,

"Starting around 1974, Xerox PARC designed and deployed an internet architecture called PUP; it was up and running on multiple machines and networks when TCP was just a design for byte stream protocols. Input from Xerox' operational experience helped convince the TCP working group to add the IP packet layer!"

Findings on Xerox Parc origins theory

This might in fact provide another answer for us - the first Internet connection may not have involved TCP/IP or government funding at all, and may be solely the result of commercial research.