We know about ARPANET, the cold-war networking research initiative which grew out of the US Defense Dept’s reaction to Soviet nuclear weapons. But there is more to the origin of today’s Internet than ARPANET. Created in 1969, ARPANET is widely, and wrongly, believed to have been the first wide-area public packet network.

But this is wrong on multiple counts. First, it was not the first. ARPANET entered a world where wide-area commercial networks were already a reality. The period of the late 1960s thru the early 1970s was a period of wild experimentation and insane growth.

Second, ARPANET was not public. It was a highly restricted, government-funded network playground for the government, military, and academia. It had a stringent “Acceptable Uses Policy (AUP)” which prohibited anything personal or commercial.

In 1991, the Internet was owned and operated by the National Science Foundation. It was an expensive operation, and being non-commercial, there was no customer revenue. We paid for it with our tax dollars, and the government subsidy was rapidly diminishing.

The NSF wanted out of this losing business. They thought they could “sell” the Internet to a corporate entity. Many had a vague idea that the network might somehow transition to commercial operation, but no one was sure how. Many thought it would simply fade away without government funding.

Those in the Internet community believed that when IBM teamed with Merit and MCI to form a partnership, they would win a contract to be this new commercial network. They assumed that this company would own the Internet and dictate usage just as the NSF had done, AUP and all. They believed the new company would act as the government’s gatekeeper.

They bristled at this prospect!

This new Merit/IBM/MCI company was called Advanced Network and Services (ANS) and operated the Internet NOC in Ann Arbor, Michigan. MCI was pushing their MCI Mail product, and saw email as the killer app for the new Internet. Beyond email, commercialization of the Internet was a murky proposition. Ideas of streaming media, Internet store fronts, and massive cloud-based applications were a scant gleam in the eye of the most advanced visionary.

Meanwhile, there arose many commercial entities jockeying for a piece of the existing network pie. They called themselves ISPs, but the acronym was not the same as we know today. It stood for IP Services Providers, and they were looking to use Internet technologies to cannibalize the many dedicated corporate networks, as well as the pre-existing commercial public packet-switched networks with a less expensive alternative. Chief among these was UUNET, founded in 1987.

They profoundly disliked ANS! They considered ANS a threat to the openness of the Internet. There was a joke at the time that said “The only thing missing from ANS is U” which appeared on a popular T-shirt at Interop Spring 1992.

Debate raged about who was going to “own” the Internet when the NSF turned off the government-funded backbone. The IP Services Providers began carrying traffic by interconnecting. From this debate emerged an independent entity beyond the control of the NSF, an interconnection point called MAE-East.

This collection of scrappy upstart ISPs united for the formation of MAE-East and drove the creation of the long-haul Commercial Internet backbone with MFS Datanet.

From there, the Commercial Internet developed and grew, and became the Internet we know today. The book “Securing the Network” tells the story of how this happened and the roles of people who made it happen.

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