Also, a fair amount of the basics of the internet is held together by government or `government', that is, IANA / ARIN and the other RIRs / ICANN (aka department of commerce). ARPANET, again government, is responsible for a packet formalism of communication on the wire, the basic protocols were made from DARPA funding. Government is good at `standards', because its a bit of a technological tyranny. Everything of value on the link and transport layer is mainly government legacy. Everything below that is free market, everything above is free market and thus marketing driven.
The Web beat Gopher because Gopher was shit, but it wasn't because TBL just made a protocol, TBL made a web browser/editor hybrid and web server, it caught on at CERN and later CERN released libwww (library instead of standard right there!) and CERN HTTPd. And then libwww was used to implement various browsers like Mosaic, and the rest is history.