Do you believe that no one would have seen the potential for networking computers without government funding?
Just because government funding was central to developing large section of the internet does not mean some similar system would not have developed anyway.
People saw the profit that could be gained by controlling their own networks of computers. Thus, before the Internet was open to the general public, there were online services like The Source, Compuserve, GEnie, AOL, which (as far as I can recall) did not interconnect.
The Internet is a network of networks, where I can rent a server on a data center owned by A which delivers bits through a pipe owned by B to a customer whose ISP is owned by C, and if I don't like A's terms of service then I can go buy equivalent bandwidth and access from A-prime. That wasn't possible with pre-Internet online providers.
Lots of people saw the potential. But considering the players involved at the time and their general lack of vision, it would have taken many more years to establish open interconnection standards if it was purely a private effort. The end result would have probably been similar, but the whole effort would have been much slower and less efficient.
Just because government funding was central to developing large section of the internet does not mean some similar system would not have developed anyway.