InterNIC

» see internic.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

i got online at the end of 1998 on a dial-up line in Turkey, which means InterNIC had already been dissolved for a few weeks by the time i typed my first domain name. It had nothing to do with me and everything to do with what i was typing. Every.com that resolved on that modem had been entered into one database in Virginia by one company under one government contract.

The National Science Foundation put the work out to bid in 1992 and awarded it in three pieces starting in 1993. Network Solutions took registration services while AT&T took the directory and database side. The third piece, information services, went to General Atomics, which was disqualified in December 1994 after a review found its work did not meet the contract, and AT&T absorbed what was left. Together they were the Internet Network Information Center, which everybody shortened.

What the registration half of it did was simple to describe and enormous in consequence. You sent in a form, a human or a script checked it, and a name existed. There was no competition, because the point of a name registry is that there cannot be two of them for the same namespace. There was also, for the first two and a half years, no charge.

That ended at midnight on 14 September 1995. A new registration cost a hundred dollars and covered two years, and renewals ran fifty dollars a year, of which a portion went to a fund for internet infrastructure. It is the single most consequential price ever put on a piece of the internet, because it turned a clerical function into a business, and the business turned out to be worth more than most of the companies that bought from it.

~ the dossier ~

~ the day somebody stole the address ~

Eugene Kashpureff thought one registry with one price list was wrong and ran an alternative called AlterNIC with its own top-level domains that almost nothing resolved. In July 1997 he made his argument by poisoning the caches of major nameservers so that lookups for www.internic.net returned the address of his own web server instead. He had spent about a year working out how to do it and called it Operation DNS Storm.

It ran between 10 and 14 July and again between 21 and 24 July, and it redirected tens of thousands of people worldwide who were trying to register or update a domain. Network Solutions went to court. A criminal complaint and an arrest warrant followed on 12 September 1997, by which point Kashpureff had left for Canada and had to be extradited. He pleaded guilty. The stunt is remembered as the first widely noticed cache poisoning attack, which was not the lesson he was going for.

~ how it ended ~

The end was administrative and had been coming for two years. The US government wanted the naming function out of a defense contractor's hands and off the National Science Foundation's budget. It also wanted the result to look less American than it was. On 18 September 1998 the InterNIC project was dissolved. Its work, along with the functions IANA had been performing under Jon Postel, was reorganized under a new California nonprofit called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, contracted to the Department of Commerce.

Network Solutions kept the registry business itself for a while longer, and competitive registration arrived over the following two years, which is why a.com costs what it costs today rather than fifty dollars. Jon Postel died three weeks after the handover, on 16 October 1998.

~ what it turned into ~

internic.net still answers. It has answered continuously since before i owned a modem, and it now serves a small ICANN information site about how to complain when a registrar loses your domain or a transfer goes wrong. The footer explains that InterNIC is a registered service mark of the US Department of Commerce, licensed to ICANN.

So the institution is twenty-eight years dead and the trademark is a government asset on loan to its successor, which keeps the site up largely so that the address does not fall into somebody else's hands. It is one of the few graves on this site where the headstone is maintained by the people who dug it.

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