The privatization of the Internet's backbone network

Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, March, 2007 by Rajiv C. Shah, Jay P. Kesan

NSF's Final Plan for the NSFNET

In June 1992, the NSF released a draft solicitation for public comment on its proposed changes to the NSFNET. The new design was developed internally by three of its engineers (Aiken, Braun, Ford, & Claffy, 1993). In response, the NSF received more than 240 pages of comments, the majority coming from industry groups. The comments largely expressed concern that only a few firms would be awarded the entire contract and, suggested instead, the desire for a more competitive network design. Several of these comments also noted potential long-term problems with the redesign. The NSF never addressed these comments and these issues were left to the backbone providers. The next section focuses on the implications of this inaction.

In the spring of 1993, the NSF released a revised solicitation in response to the comments on the proposed changes to the NSFNET (NSF, 1993). The new design had three parts. The first part consisted of a Routing Arbiter, which operates as a "traffic cop" to ensure consistent routing policies. The second part proposed the creation of a Very High Speed Backbone Service (vBNS) to replace the NSFNET as a new high-speed backbone for research and educational use. The third part of the revised solicitation concerned the use of network access points (NAPs) to connect together the vBNS, federal networks, and commercial backbone networks. The concept of multiple backbones interconnecting through NAPs is shown in Figure 2. Instead of a central backbone connecting the regional networks, the regional networks had to choose a commercial backbone network. This network structure ensured a place for multiple commercial backbone providers. To ensure interconnectivity, the commercial backbone networks would interconnect at the NAPs. This new design appeared to provide a level playing field for commercial backbone providers, because any backbone could connect at the NAPs.

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

In February 1994, the NSF awarded contracts to establish four NAPs. The contracts were to Sprint for New York, MFS for Washington, DC, Ameritech for Chicago, and Pacific Bell for California. By October, the regional networks were supposed to purchase connectivity from a commercial provider and disconnect from the NSFNET backbone. None of the regional networks were able to meet the October deadline, but 6 months later they were migrated to commercial providers (Fazio, 1995). On April 30, 1995, the NSFNET was retired. The government had successfully transitioned the network to multiple commercial backbone providers.

A year later, the NSF ended its contracts for the four public NAPs. In effect, this transferred control of the NAPs to their private-sector contractors (Farnon & Huddle, 1997). By this point, the government had transitioned from contracting out services to allowing the market to provide Internet backbone service--thus fully privatizing the Internet backbone network. The government had no ongoing role in overseeing or regulating the backbone network. After this decision, the only remaining NSF-subsidized backbone service was the vBNS. The vBNS served as the initial foundation of the ongoing Internet2 networking effort.