[ih] A revolution in Internet point-of-view - Was Re: Internet analyses (Was Re: IPv8...)

Sun May 10 17:49:20 PDT 2026

"From the earliest days, the ARPANET & Internet were self-funding from
revenue - yes ARPA & then NSF provided funds for researchers to purchase
telecom, but then came the regionals (notably NEARnet) that started
accepting commercial traffic, and then the whole infrastructure was opened
to the public in 1992."

Miles, that's not quite right. ARPANET was paid for directly by ARPA -
funcing BBN to build and operate, funding universities and research labs to
develop host level protocols and applications. The Internet development
initially consisted of ARPA-funded Arpanet, Packet Radio Net and Packet
Satellite Net. The came NSFNET, paid for by NSF and implemented by IBM, MCI
and Merit. NASA Science Internet linking NASA labs. -paid for by NASA.
ESNET linking DOE leaps, paid for by DOE. The regional networks were
partially funded by NSF but were required to become self- supporting over a
5 year period (initially 3). It was only in 1989 that UUNET, PSINET and
CERFNET were commercial operators that were formally allowed to connect to
the USG networks in 1992 (although permission was given to connect
commercial MCI Mail to NSFNET in 1989 as an experiment undertaken by CNRI.

v

On Sun, May 10, 2026 at 8:10 PM Miles Fidelman via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> Re. "give away:"
>
>
>   1.
> Those were the days when, if the government paid for something, the IP
> went into the public domain.
>   2.
> The Internet grew a lot like the airlines & aerospace industry.  Between
> war & airmail, early government spending - for goods & services - paid for
> infrastructure & an industrial ecosystem that then took off on its own.
> (The phrase "primed the pump" comes to mind.)
>   3.
> From the earliest days, the ARPANET & Internet were self-funding from
> revenue - yes ARPA & then NSF provided funds for researchers to purchase
> telecom, but then came the regionals (notably NEARnet) that started
> accepting commercial traffic, and then the whole infrastructure was opened
> to the public in 1992.
>
> Miles
>
>
> ________________________________
> From: Internet-history <internet-history-bounces at elists.isoc.org> on
> behalf of Jack Haverty via Internet-history <
> internet-history at elists.isoc.org>
> Sent: Sunday, May 10, 2026 5:02 PM
> To: internet-history at elists.isoc.org <internet-history at elists.isoc.org>
> Subject: Re: [ih] A revolution in Internet point-of-view - Was Re:
> Internet analyses (Was Re: IPv8...)
>
> There was a different climate in the 1960s/1970s.  That was the era of
> the Vietnam War and associated protests and events such as Kent State.
> Lots of pushback especially from young folks.  Even the resignation of a
> POTUS, under threat of removal from office.  Lots of distrust of
> government.  Lots of anger.
>
> Is it so different now?
>
> But I don't recall that as the dominating factor in the 60s/70s/80s.
> The USG did not "give away" the Internet.  The Internet (and previously
> the ARPANET) was always considered an Experiment.  That followed the
> charter of ARPA - "Advanced" Research projects Agency.  Research
> produces ideas.  Experiments build prototypes to test theories.
> Research produces knowledge.  Freely sharing that knowledge would be
> beneficial to the "real systems" that followed.  Artifacts, such as
> protocols, algorithms, equipment designs, software, and such concrete
> items are at best prototypes for the real systems of the future.
>
> The "real system" was expected to be OSI.  Of course that didn't
> happen.   But it was The Plan.  Even the USG had a program called GOSIP
> (Government OSI Profile?) to plan for the use of OSI throughout USG.  As
> long as The Internet was considered just a research experiment, it had
> no long-term value and giving it away didn't raise significant
> objections.  It might even help OSI development.  OSI was the target.
>
> Instead, what happened was an explosion of industry-led alternatives to
> both The Internet and the OSI promises.  In the "multiprotocol router"
> stage of the late 1980s and 1990s, all sorts of other schemes were
> produced by companies, each hoping that their technology would be the
> winner to create the communications infrastructure of the future, and
> all the others would just fade away.  Most of them had some ambition of
> global domination, e.g., by offering products to create a "global LAN".
> But the users were impatient, and selected the only technology which was
> available to them at the time to tie all their IT into a cohesive
> infrastructure - The Internet and TCP/IP.   Its adoption by the USG
> established confidence that The Internet would live long and prosper.
>
> It was straightforward for a corporation to build its own clone of The
> Internet, separate from but perhaps connected to The Internet for
> electronic mail service.   So lots of corporations did just that.  The
> IT industry noticed, and itself adopted The Internet as its product
> architecture.   A similar history might be told of Unix and Linux,
> becoming the base IT environment for all those servers on The Internet.
>
> So, ... is it so different today?
>
> The Internet has clearly won at the levels of datagrams and web. TCP/IP
> and HTTP and their friends are the de facto standard.
>
> But a similar war is now happening at levels where AI and Social Media
> live, on top of The Internet.  I see lots of corporations creating
> competing AI services or social media platforms, each hoping to be the
> winner and become the infrastructure of the future.  Even electronic
> mail has fragmented into a blizzard of ways for people to communicate.
>
> But unlike the situation 50 or 60 years ago, I haven't noticed any
> ARPA-like effort to do the research and "give away" the results for
> others to use.  Such things are what The Internet considers "apps" and
> outside their scope?   Perhaps such research organizations exist, other
> than in corporate walled gardens, and I just haven't been looking hard
> enough.    There may be no technology "waiting in the wings" for users
> to embrace until one of them becomes the clear winner.
>
> Is that an "attitude of society"?
>
> /Jack Haverty
>
>
> It seems to me that today's
>
> On 5/10/26 11:36, Greg Skinner via Internet-history wrote:
> > On Apr 29, 2026, at 6:13 AM, Andrew Sullivan via Internet-history <
> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> >> Tempted as I am to editorialize about what this might mean for the
> Internet (I am profoundly depressed about it), I wonder whether those who
> where involved in the Internet's earliest developments have any reflections
> on the attitudes of the societies at the time.  For instance, kc claffy
> once observed to me that it was an inspired bit of industrial policy that
> led the USG (partly it seems to me at the prodding of Al Gore, despite all
> the grief he gets about the topic) to give away the Internet rather than
> lock it into any particular corporate ownership.  I know there is another
> thread that has discussed the BSD-TCP/IP importance, but I guess I'm asking
> for something different: was there a different _social_ environment, in
> your estimation and upon reflection, than there is (say) today such that
> the USG could give such a technology away as they did?  I find it
> impossible to imagine that happening today, when every organization either
> public or private seems to be orieted entirely towards maximum short-term
> financial return on investment, ignoring the longer term benefits.  (And,
> to avoid any doubt, let me be clear that this is not a particular swipe at
> the current USG or any people in charge of it.  This has seemed obvious to
> me for a decade or more.)
> >>
> > I would also include the Linux importance. [1] [2] Quite a bit of TCP/IP
> became available via open source due to Linux.
> >
> > --gregbo
> >
> > [1] https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/
> > [2] http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/
> >
>
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