The 1990s transition from the US Internet infrastructure being a government run research project to the multiple privately owned networks.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Science_Foundation_Net...

That wasn't regulation, was it? It was originally a government project that they then opened up. There wasn't any regulation preventing private equivalents, and indeed there were quite a few private computer networks with similar capabilities. They all failed once the internet opened up, because the government-sponsored, government-run network was ultimately much superior.