The commercialization of the Internet encompasses the creation and management of online services principally for financial gain. It typically involves the increasing monetization of network services and consumer products mediated through the varied use of Internet technologies. Common forms of Internet commercialization include e-commerce (electronic commerce), electronic money, and advanced marketing techniques including personalized and targeted advertising. The effects of the commercialization of the Internet are controversial, with benefits that simplify daily life and repercussions that challenge personal freedoms, including surveillance capitalism and data tracking. This began with the National Science Foundation funding supercomputing center and then universities being able to develop supercomputer sites for research and academic purposes.

With the growing population and demands of Internet users, startups and their investors were encouraged to start profiting off of the Internet.

The core idea of the web was outlined by Vannevar Bush in 1945 as interconnected networks of hyperlinked pages. The first attempt to materialize this vision was by Ted Nelson in 1965 all the way up to 1984, a decade before Netscape.

In the mid-1980s, the National Science Foundation, the backbone of the internet at the time, claimed that the Internet was for research and not commerce. This strict allocation of funding was known as the "acceptable use policy." The NSF were firm believers that the Internet would be thwarted and devalued if it were to open up to commercial interests.^{[citation needed]}

However, simultaneously in April 1984 CompuServe's Consumer Information Service opened a new online shopping service called the Electronic Shopping Mall that allowed subscribers to buy from merchants including American Express, Sears, and over sixty other retailers.

NSFNET, the National Science Foundation Network, was a three-layer network that acted as a backbone for much of the internet's infrastructure. Originally funded by the government, NSFNET was a big leap into the future which allowed networks to run smoothly. It allowed people to view pages without any cost to institutions. The allowance of users to access websites without having to pay to go on them would further develop the idea of being able to browse for items on the internet in the future. In 1992, interested entrepreneurs who believed there was money to be made from the Internet petitioned Congress to get the government out of the way of NSFNET.

UUNET was the first company to sell commercial TCP/IP, first to government-approved corporations in November 1988 and then actively to the public starting in January 1990, albeit only to the NSFNET backbone with their approval.

Barry Shein's The World STD was selling dial-up Internet on a legally questionable basis starting in late 1989 or early 1990, and then on an approved basis by 1992. He claims to be and is generally recognized as the first to ever think of selling dial-up Internet access for money. The High Performance Computing Act of 1991 put U.S. government money behind the National Information Infrastructure, the National Research and Education Network (NREN), the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, and more.