By the early 1990s, the last official barriers to business and commerce on the Internet were torn down through a combination of congressional legislation and new rules from the National Science Foundation, the organization that supported the Internet. The noncommercial status of the Internet was rooted in its history as a government-funded project operating mainly through universities and government agencies, but businesses were persistent in arguing that they belonged online as well. In 1993, the Internet became fully open for business with the passage of the National Information Infrastructure Act, which “clearly took the development of the Internet out of the hands of the government and placed it into the hands of the competitive marketplace.”