Commercial Internet eXchange

» see cix.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

in 1991 i was seven and the internet had not arrived at my house or at my country. by the time it did, down a modem, in 1998, the fight this thing existed to have was long over and had been won so completely that nobody bothered explaining it to anyone. that is the normal shape of infrastructure. you learn the name of it only after you notice you have been standing on it the entire time.

the problem it solved is easy to state and sounds unhinged now. the nsfnet backbone moved most of the internet traffic in the united states and was funded by the national science foundation, so it came with an acceptable use policy: traffic had to be in support of research and education. commercial traffic was not permitted. there were already commercial networks by 1990, psinet and uunet among them, with customers who wanted to reach each other, but the road between those networks belonged to the government and the government said no.

so they built a road with no owner who had an opinion about it. meetings through the middle of 1991 in reston, virginia, then commercial operation out of a psinet facility in santa clara that autumn. cerfnet in san diego signed as the third party. the rule was no settlement, meaning that whatever crossed, nobody billed anybody. one cisco router, and above the router an agreement that what passed over it was nobody's business except the two networks at either end.

the reason any of this reaches a turkish teenager plugging a modem into a wall socket seven years later is direct rather than sentimental. a dial-up account at an isp fetching a page from a company in another country is precisely the transaction the acceptable use policy forbade. somebody had to make that legal first, and it got made legal by an argument and a router rather than by a law.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the blockade ~

the part usually left out is that cix spent a couple of years behaving like the thing it was built against. advanced network and services ran the nsfnet backbone and could carry commercial traffic under its own arrangements, and it refused to connect to the cix, which split the commercial internet into two halves that could not properly reach each other. mitch kapor, who had founded lotus and by then had the eff, took the cix over from marty schoffstall and talked ans into connecting in june 1992 as a trial it could walk away from without ever joining.

then cix started blocking regional networks that had not paid the ten thousand dollar membership fee. an organization founded on the principle that traffic should pass freely between networks had worked out that it was now the toll booth. by 1995 it hardly mattered. the nsfnet backbone was decommissioned that april and the acceptable use policy went into the ground with it, and private peering was by then being arranged directly between networks anyway, without needing a shared room to do it in.

~ what happened to the router ~

the hardware moved to the palo alto internet exchange in april 1996 and kept running another five years on traffic that only went down. in 2001 uunet turned down its peering session and the exchange was finished, a decade after the first packet went across it. the association carried on a while longer as a trade body under barbara dooley, funded mostly by at&t. in 2002 it reorganized under the name of its own spinoff and became the usispa.

the cisco 7500 went to the national museum of american history in november 2005. for whatever reason that is the right ending for a machine whose entire purpose was to be a place where a particular rule did not apply. it is an object now, in a collection, next to other objects.

cix.org is still registered. the whois creation date reads 11 july 1991, a few weeks ahead of the first public web page going up, and the domain has never lapsed since. it sits at a consumer registrar today and serves exactly one thing: a teal wordmark reading cix, a dot beside it, and nothing else on the page. really though, somebody out there is still paying the renewal on the domain that broke the acceptable use policy, thirty-five years on.

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