[ih] AUP revision to allow commercial traffic

[John Curran]

> On Dec 4, 2015, at 11:16 AM, Larry press <larrypress at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Folks,
> 
> The NSF Web site says "In March 1991, the NSFNET acceptable use policy
> was altered to allow commercial traffic:"
> 
> http://www.nsf.gov/od/lpa/nsf50/nsfoutreach/htm/n50_z2/pages_z3/28_pg.htm
> 
> But this statement of the AUP, dated June 1992, contradicts that:
> 
> https://w2.eff.org/Net_culture/Net_info/Technical/Policy/nsfnet.policy
> 
> When was the AUP changed to allow commercial traffic?

Mumble.   There were significant changes in 1991 and 1992 which affected
commercial traffic on the NSFNET.

(This is actually an example of where the wikipedia article is fairly complete:
 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Science_Foundation_Network#Commercial_traffic <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Science_Foundation_Network#Commercial_traffic>>)

Prior to the NSFNSF AUP change in 1991, organizations connecting that were clearly 
commercial in nature would be asked (either by NSF, Merit, or the NNSC at BBN) 
whether their usage was going directly in support of research (e.g. DECWRL, HP 
Labs, etc.), as it was generally not assumed to be the case.

Several months after the 1991 NSFNET AUP change, I know that the NNSC was 
told that interconnection of commercial entities could be assumed to be in 
support of research and educational purposes (I presume the Merit folks were 
told the same.)

Rick Adam’s reflects on this change in the state of affairs (pre-1991 vs post-1991 
NSFNET connection) in an interesting-people email here: <http://archive.is/vTrkS <http://archive.is/vTrkS>>

Even after the NSFNSF AUP change, a purely commercial network was not supposed 
to be routed over the NSFNET, and this was something that the newly formed ANS CO+RE 
folks took care to remind NSFNET regional networks about…  (all while coincidentally 
reminding them of the availability of their commercial packet routing over the same 
infrastructure, aka, COMBits  <ftp://ftp.cs.toronto.edu/doc/net.policy/ans-plan.txt <ftp://ftp.cs.toronto.edu/doc/net.policy/ans-plan.txt>>).

While there was some purely commercial interconnection with the NSFNET, this
was predominantly via the brokered interconnection with the CIX and commercial
networks not participating in the CIX were not routed on the NSFNET infrastructure
in general (e.g. <http://www.merit.edu/mail.archives/mjts/1992-06/msg00015.html <http://www.merit.edu/mail.archives/mjts/1992-06/msg00015.html>>).

Minor routing issues related to purely commercial use of the NSFNET continued to 
come up from time to time until the transition over to 5 commercial backbones 
[UUNET, PSI, BBB, MCI, Sprintlink] architecture (aka “vBNS/RA/NAP”) in 1994.

/John

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