People arguing about public vs. private are missing the mark entirely. It has nothing to do with that. It's all about how many people have to do a task.

The US govt got to the moon and created a nuclear bomb in a relatively tiny amount of time, all entirely because it was a relatively small number of people focused on the same task. As for people who own routers? Thousands and thousands of them who all have different interests who aren't all focused on the same goal.

Getting a large group of people to do one simple task is 100x harder than getting a small group of people to do a complex task. This is why humanity got to the moon but still are stuck on IPv4.