>The private sector left to its own devices came up with tons of incompatible small networks all vying to be the juggernaut.

And they also built gateways so they could interface with each other. The pressure to connect them together was enormous.

For another example, Unicode isn't a government standard, and has replaced the various earlier competing protocols.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode#History

The idea that the private sector won't standardize has plenty of counterexamples. Ethernet, for another.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet#History