He said "flourished". The state of being implemented by some basic government-funded research is almost completely disconnected from the time when commercial interests took the idea and ran with it -- causing it to "flourish".

The internet wasn't implemented by some basic government funded research. It was designed and built under a DARPA project and designed and implemented by key pieces of the military industrial complex (BBN, etc). It was run by the DOD and "flourished" long before it was commercialized.

The Internet isn't ARPANET any more than Ethernet is ALOHA.

The technology that made the Internet possible was almost exclusively private sector technology. The desire, effort and vision to put together large networks was already in place by the time the government made their move.

The government helped, no question about it, but all the pieces were already there to make it happen. The private sector was driving that direction and would have built out very large networks regardless of the government.

The record contradicts what you are saying here; what you've written is almost a perfect inversion of historical fact. All the commercial networks being developed or deployed when the Internet was being invented were circuit switched, centralized networks. They really didn't have anything to do with the Internet at all. The design philosophy behind the Internet [1, Section 3] was drastically different than all commercial efforts at the time. The design was so different and so unique compared to existing work that the inventors won a Turing Award for it.

As an aside, all of the above is typically covered in the first week or two of a networking course (I like Brighten Godfrey's [2]).

[1] http://ccr.sigcomm.org/archive/1995/jan95/ccr-9501-clark.pdf

[2] http://courses.engr.illinois.edu/cs538/