How did the end of the Cold War influence the commercialization of the internet?

The Cold War’s end freed up billions for civilian networks

When the Cold War ended, a “peace dividend” moved at least $30 billion over four years out of Pentagon research and into advanced civilian fields, including national computer networks and fiber‑optic communications [6]. This sudden flow of money helped build the physical backbone that a commercial Internet would ride on.

A post‑Cold‑War law funded the killer app: the Mosaic web browser

The 1991 High Performance Computing Act (the “Gore Bill”) provided federal money to the National Center for Supercomputing Applications [4]. There, a team of programmers built the Mosaic browser in 1993—the “technological springboard” that launched the 1990s Internet boom [4]. One of Mosaic’s creators later remarked that without this government funding, private industry would not have delivered the commercial Internet until years later [5].

The government stepped aside and let businesses take over

The early Internet was a military‑academic tool, and commercial activity was either banned outright or legally very risky [1][2][3]. With the Cold War over, Washington no longer needed to keep a tight grip on the network. First, ARPANET was officially retired in 1990, after industry partnerships had already paved the way for a private, expanded Internet [7][8]. Next, on April 30, 1995, the NSFNET backbone—which still blocked most commercial traffic—was permanently shut down, and all traffic moved to commercial backbones [9][10][11]. That was the final step in turning the Internet into the open, for‑profit network we know today.