[ih] Internet should be in private hands

[John Gilmore]

>>>     I have heard a couple of times that there was a moment in the history
>>> of the Internet where private companies were putting pressure on the
>>> community indicating that the Internet had to be controlled by a private
>>> company, that it had to be in the hands of someone, not in their free
>>> will. Is it so?

I recall a time when the Domain Name System top-level domain (TLD) for
each country had to be handled by a private party, not by the government
that ran the country.

For example, the .au domain for Australia was originally run by Robert
Elz at Melbourne University.  By 2001, a private nonprofit called ".au
Domain Administration" had been organized to run it instead, with the
"endorsement of the Commonwealth of Australia (the Commonwealth) of auDA
as the appropriate to hold the delegation of authority by the Internet
Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) for administrative
authority of the au country code top level domain (ccTLD)".

As a separate response...

The original Internet was operated completely by government contractors
(like BBN or MERIT).  Eventually, in the early 1990s, private parties
built their own networks that used the IP protocols.  UUNET was an early
one, which didn't receive government subsidies, unlike the bloated and
therefore generally unresponsive NSFnet regional networks like BARRNET.
The private IP networks were soon gatewayed to each other, and to the
government-run parts of the Internet, so that it all acted as one big
Internet.  Then it became possible for both government projects, and
ordinary companies or people, to just buy Internet service from this new
concept, an "ISP".

Soon after that, there was a general move on the part of the US
Government to get out of the business of running operational IP
networks.  Instead, parts of the government (like the NSF) could just
fund their grantees to buy Internet access from any commercial provider.

(Even after that, experimental networks such as the Gigabit Internet
Testbed could be fully funded and operated by government agencies or
their contractors.)

	John