Originally posted on a December 20th on Xitter a couple of years back.
On the 20th December 1991, a Friday and for all practical purposes the last working day before Christmas, I arrived at my new office at Zweierstrasse 35 in Zürich (@nine can just see it if they lean out of the window 🙂), to find out that the Swiss academic network SWITCH had started blocking select large customers of the bootstrapped ISP the CHUUG, now /ch/open, a colleague and myself had created early in the year.
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This was a thinly veiled attempt to try to get those customers to move to their Internet service. While it didn't quite fit with the industry policy aspects of their mission: the academic networks at the time were being funded to stop the Internet happening, not to promote it (see http://ictconsulting.ch/reports/European-Researcg-Internet-History.pdf), cornering the market for Internet access in the country was seen as a possible way of financing their operations.
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This is not just conjecture, we actually got copies of the letters SWITCH had sent to our customers to "convince" them to move [I've previously never mentioned this to avoid people getting in to trouble].
This was long before SWITCH had realised the jackpot they had won with control over the .ch domain and had more money than they knew what to do with. How that came about is an interesting story in itself though not as well documented.
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Now at the time, interactive Internet use was barely a thing, the WWW was still 3-4 years away, so the impact was small, most of our customers were still just using mail and Usenet. We tried to work through back channels to get this resolved and didn't go very public with the matter, however it is mentioned in @carlmalamud https://www.amazon.com/Exploring-Internet-Travelogue-Carl-Malamud/dp/0132968983 likely making it the 1st documented (commercial) peering dispute.
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I was in the process of ordering our 1st 64kps "digital" leased line (very expensive and took ages to deliver) to Geneva to hook up to the line to Amsterdam and the wider Internet that was co-financed by EUnet, on top of that we had moved to offices with a lot more facilities aka phone lines. We definitely needed more customers not less, so rocking the boat wasn't an option.
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Not to mention that this was still the Switzerland of the Käseunion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_Cheese_Union and anti-competitive behaviour was the norm and not going to get anybody upset. Some will say (Init7) that nothing has really changed since then.
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In any case the block continued on through 1992, ironically most of the complaints were from SWITCH users that couldn't FTP to sites of our customers, while the Internet wasn't the vast place it was to become yet, it was still large enough that losing a bit of access didn't hurt that much.
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One day the block just vanished. Unlike most of our colleagues that had started setting up similar national ISPs we never enjoyed a period of low or no competition, but it didn't stop us from turning the operation in to a big success that continued on 1st as EUnet AG, then as part of EUnet Intermational. and then finally as KPNQwest.
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