[ih] Commercial ISPs (Re: Some Questions over IPv4 Ownership)

[Ofer Inbar]

On Mon, Oct 11, 2010 at 08:03:49PM -0700,
jfh <jack at 3kitty.org> wrote:
> Somewhere along the line, commercial ISPs popped into being.  I'm
> not sure who was first, but my recollection is that this happened as
> spinoffs from NSFNet and/or CSNet.  Again, there must have been some
> kind of agreements between those commercial entities and a piece of
> the government, detailing the rules about ownership.  These first
> ISPs were different because they were not research collaborators.
> They were in business simply to make money selling Internet service.

Software Tool & Die's (aka "the World") was the first commercial
consumer ISP, and UUNET was the first commercial IP network provider -
who sold IP service to STD.

STD's primary business was actually software consulting, they just
sold Internet service because they wanted to make it available to
the public, IIRC.  It didn't become the focus of their business until
some years later, by which point there were a lot of other ISPs.
I could be mistaken about their business and goals, but maybe someone
from STD is on this list to comment.

Although UUNET was willing to route commercial traffic, the NSFnet
"backbone" at the time was not; blocks of IPs assigned to non-research
entities did not get routed across the NSFnet, which meant they
couldn't get to a lot of the Internet.  So early users of the World
had partial IP connectivity; they could send email anywhere, through
UUNET's relays, but they couldn't telnet or ftp everywhere.  They could
connect to some but not all IRC servers, but of course as long as
some IRC servers they connected to were connected to some of the rest,
they could chat live with anyone on IRC anywhere on the Internet.

[ IIRC they started selling access to TCP/IP accounts before http
  began, though it may have been the other way 'round, but either way,
  there was not much of a "web" at the time.  Real TCP/IP access
  mattered mainly for telnet, ftp, talk/ytalk, irc, and gopher, more
  or less in that order of importance I believe. ]

Certainly, the main issue back then about IP address allocations was
not "what addresses do you own" but rather "how can you get your
traffic routed".  Addresses were plentiful and you were going to get
enough of them to suit what you were doing without trouble.
  -- Cos