Commercial use of the Internet was a new and radical concept!

There is much more to the origin of the network than the story of ARPANET. This is the inside story, told by those who were there, of how the highly restricted, government-funded network playground of the government, military, and academia was usurped to create the modern Commercial Internet. This book provides not just the inside story but immense volumes of supporting information, documentation, videos and more.

One man with drive and conviction became the visionary who united a collection of scrappy upstart ISPs for the formation of MAE-East, drove the creation of the long-haul Commercial Internet backbone at MFS Datanet, and then became a pioneer of the media-rich streaming data services that came into being at the ill-fated Enron Broadband Services prior to the Dot-com bubble burst in March of 2000.

In 1991, the Internet was owned and operated by the National Science Foundation and was strictly limited in the things for which it could be used. In particular, the NSF had an Acceptable Uses Policy, a.k.a. the AUP, which prohibited anything which could be considered personal or commercial usage of the Internet.

The NSF was looking to "sell" the Internet to a corporate entity and get out of the operation of the network. Many in the Internet community believed that when IBM teamed with Merit and MCI to form a partnership in a new company, they would win a contract to be this new backbone. Many in the Internet community assumed that if this happened, they would own the Internet and dictate usage just as the NSF had done.

They bristled at this prospect.

This new Merit/IBM/MCI company was called Advanced Network and Services (ANS) and operated the Internet NOC in Ann Arbor Michigan as part of the venture.

Many of the small private Internet providers profoundly disliked ANS. They considered ANS a threat to the openness of the Internet. There was a joke at the time that said "The only thing missing from ANS is U" which appeared on a popular T-Shirt at Interop 1992.

Debate raged about who was going to "own" the Internet when the NSF turned off the government-funded backbone. Small IP Services Providers began carrying traffic by interconnecting. From this debate emerged an independent entity beyond the control of the NSF, an interconnection point called MAE-East.

From there, the Commercial Internet evolved and grew, and became the Internet we know today. The book "Securing the Network" tells the story of how this happened and the role of myself, many of my friends and co-workers, and especially that of my close friend and business partner F. Scott Yeager.

If you use the Internet, work with the Internet, or are just interested in the history of the Internet, you need to read this book.