[ih] AUP revision to allow commercial traffic

[Vint Cerf]

I had permission from FNC to link MCI Mail to the Internet (via NSFNET
basically) in 1988 and made the connection in summer 1989. Other commercial
email providers were also given permission. So there was already some
bending of AUP at the same time three commercial ISPs were in operation.

v


On Tue, Dec 22, 2015 at 8:19 AM, John Curran <jcurran at istaff.org> wrote:

>
> 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>
>
> 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>).
>
> 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>).
>
> 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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>


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