Beyond the technology, it took a substatial and very purposful effort to overcome the weight of monopolist incumbants, symbolized as "bellheads" in policy and technology domains. Most of the effort to do so was from the technical community inside the US government. The breakthroughs involved growing the IETF, spreading the protocol widely around the US and the world, and building relentlessly on the evolution of computing in science and technology. It was no slam dunk until after all that happenned.