Everyone agreed on the goal: develop a global computer network. They didn’t agree on how. By the early 1980s, several different protocols competed.
OSI (Open Systems Interconnect), backed by European telephone monopolies and most governments, was favoured. Other strong competitors included two corporate networks, IBM’s SNA and DEC’s DECNET. The dark horse contender was the internet, defined only by a self-governing community dependent on volunteers.
The internet community was nimble – able to develop in months what took the OSI committee-based process years – but it scared off some potential adopters because nobody seemed “in charge”.