Securing the Network

Securing the NetworkCommercial use of the Internet was a new and radical concept! We know about ARPANET, the cold war networking research initiative which grew out of the US Defense Depts reaction to Soviet nuclear weapons. But there is more to the origin of todays 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.

Commercial use of the Internet was a new and radical concept!
We know about ARPANET, the cold-war networking research initiative which grew out of the US Defense DeptÕs reaction to Soviet nuclear weapons. But there is more to the origin of todayÕs 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 ÒAcceptable Uses Policy (AUP)Ó 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 ÒsellÓ 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 governmentÕs 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.