[ih] Enforecment of NSFNET's Acceptable Use Policy

[Ofer Inbar]

This is months old but I just stumbled on it again and it reminded me
of something.

On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 05:03:05PM +0200,
Matthias Brwolff <mbaer at cs.tu-berlin.de> wrote:
> I was wondering if anyone knows about or has pointers to sources on
> actual cases of violations of NSFNET's Acceptable Use Policy and
> repercussions of such cases. The final report is silent on this specific
> point.
> 
> - Has there ever been a case where someone (some network) had its access
> to NSFNET's backbone removed (or was at least told off or fined in any way)?
> 
> - How did NSF monitor the use of their backbone?
> 
> - Was there any effect of the AUP other than people "feeling"
> constrained by it, and not blatantly advertising things in a commercial
> fashion?
> 
> The only statement I found on this comes from an obscure source
> (netdictionary.com/a.html) saying "its [NSFnet's AUP's] limitations on
> commercial activity were so widely ignored that it was finally abandoned
> in 1994".

I recall that when world.std.com, which had been selling accounts like
many other "pubnix" sites, got an Internet hookup via UUNET circa 1991,
there were a lot of pieces of the Internet that World users couldn't
route to directly, because the NFSnet backbone didn't route their traffic.

I had friends on World and we used to do various things to get around
the restrictions.  For example, they couldn't always talk/ytalk to
their friends' accounts, but there were some IRC servers they could
connect to, and their chat would get through the IRC network.

I do remember people at Software Tool and Die telling me that the
NFSnet AUP was the reason for this, but I don't have any real
information beyond that.
  -- Cos