No argument. The internet itself wasn't invented by one person from one country alone however. Tim Berners-Lee probably played the most pivotal role in what we have today:
WHO INVENTED THE INTERNET?
No one person invented the internet. When networking technology was first developed, a number of scientists and engineers brought their research together to create
the ARPANET. Later, other inventors’ creations paved the way for the web as we know it today.
• PAUL BARAN (1926–2011)
An engineer whose work overlapped with ARPA’s research. In 1959 he joined an American think tank, the RAND Corporation, and was asked to research how the US Air Force could keep control of its fleet if a nuclear attack ever happened. In 1964 Baran proposed a communication network with no central command point. If one point was destroyed, all surviving points would still be able to communicate with each other. He called this a distributed network.
• LAWRENCE ROBERTS (1937–2018)
Chief scientist at ARPA, responsible for developing computer networks. Paul Baran’s idea appealed to Roberts, and he began to work on the creation of a distributed network.
• LEONARD KLEINROCK (1934–)
An American scientist who worked towards the creation of a distributed network alongside Lawrence Roberts.
• DONALD DAVIES (1924–2000)
A British scientist who, at the same time as Roberts and Kleinrock, was developing similar technology at the National Physical Laboratory in Middlesex.
• BOB KAHN (1938–) AND VINT CERF (1943–)
American computer scientists who developed
TCP/IP, the set of protocols that governs how data moves through a network. This helped the ARPANET evolve into the internet we use today. Vint Cerf is credited with the first written use of the word ‘internet’.
• PAUL MOCKAPETRIS (1948–) AND JON POSTEL (1943–98)
Inventors of
DNS, the ‘phone book of the internet’.
• TIM BERNERS-LEE (1955–)
Creator of the
World Wide Web who developed many of the principles we still use today, such as HTML, HTTP, URLs and web browsers.
• MARC ANDREESSEN (1971–)
Inventor of Mosaic, the first widely-used web browser.