In 1988, a National Research Council committee, chaired by Kleinrock and with Kahn
and Clark as members, produced a report commissioned by NSF titled "Towards a
National Research Network". This report was influential on then Senator Al Gore, and
ushered in high speed networks that laid the networking foundation for the future
information superhighway.
In 1994, a National Research Council report, again chaired by Kleinrock (and with
Kahn and Clark as members again), Entitled "Realizing The Information Future: The
Internet and Beyond" was released. This report, commissioned by NSF, was the
document in which a blueprint for the evolution of the information superhighway was
articulated and which has had a lasting affect on the way to think about its evolution. It
anticipated the critical issues of intellectual property rights, ethics, pricing, education,
architecture and regulation for the Internet.
NSF's privatization policy culminated in April, 1995, with the defunding of the NSFNET
Backbone. The funds thereby recovered were (competitively) redistributed to regional
networks to buy national-scale Internet connectivity from the now numerous, private,
long-haul networks.
The backbone had made the transition from a network built from routers out of the research
community (the "Fuzzball" routers from David Mills) to commercial equipment. In its 8 1/2 year
lifetime, the Backbone had grown from six nodes with 56 kbps links to 21 nodes with multiple 45
Mbps links. It had seen the Internet grow to over 50,000 networks on all seven continents and
outer space, with approximately 29,000 networks in the United States.
Such was the weight of the NSFNET program's ecumenism and funding ($200 million from
1986 to 1995) - and the quality of the protocols themselves - that by 1990 when the ARPANET
itself was finally decommissioned10, TCP/IP had supplanted or marginalized most other
wide-area computer network protocols worldwide, and IP was well on its way to becoming THE
bearer service for the Global Information Infrastructure.
All of which happened before 1998.
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