Ancestors

Written by Simon Poole on 2024-12-20 at 07:37

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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Written by Simon Poole on 2024-12-20 at 11:37

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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Written by Simon Poole on 2024-12-20 at 11:38

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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Written by Simon Poole on 2024-12-20 at 11:39

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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Toot

Written by Carl Malamud on 2024-12-20 at 15:26

@simon Now available for the low low price of $0: https://public.resource.org/eti/ and https://archive.org/details/exploringinterne00carl

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Descendants