[JeremyReimer]

I think it would be very unlikely for the web and html to arise in the current political climate, yes. It only came to be in the first place because of a massive amount of government investment that was an artifact of the space race in the late 1960s and early 70s. For a time, all the major tech companies were trying to build their own walled garden alternatives to the Internet (Microsoft with MSN, Apple with eWorld, AOL, Prodigy, Compuserve, etc.) and they only failed because the Internet grew faster than any one of them could.