More Internet History, in Consultation with Vint Cerf
by Jeff Drobman (c) 2014
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October 29 will mark the 45th anniversary of the "birth of the Internet" (or at least "of the ARPANET") at UCLA.  For 45 years now, those US and foreign "engineers and academics" working in concert in a spirit of unity have kept the Internet open and minimally regulated, and have administered the Internet brilliantly.  We all join The Times' call for the ITU to stay out of Internet regulation or oversight.

Just two years ago, I asked none other than Internet pioneer Dr. Vint Cerf (co-inventor of the Internet protocols) about the ITU's attempted power grab over Internet regulation.  Dr. Cerf feels that some member states of the international ITU, urged by US adversaries China, Russia and Arab states, are trying to wrest some control from the de facto Internet administrators:  the  IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) and ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers).  The ITU is falsely claiming the current administrative organizations are too dominated by the US, when in fact there is substantial international presence.  Dr. Cerf further asserts that those Internet organizations are for management and maintenance of the Internet, not for regulation, per se.

Internet History
"The Internet" evolved from the first wide area computer network (packet-switched and routed) ever:  the "ARPANET".  That first network was defined by ARPA director Dr. Lawrence Roberts (wrote specs, put out RFQ), designed by BBN, and built out by Dr. Cerf, UCLA Prof. Leonard Kleinrock, and later ARPA chief Dr. Robert Kahn (together regarded by some as the "four fathers of the Internet").  These were the "engineers and academics" who designed and built the ARPANET -- which was born in a UCLA lab on October 29, 1969 (via the first remote logon, from UCLA to SRI computers.)

Dr. Cerf says the "Internet concept emerged" in 1973, when Cerf and others decided to expand ARPANET's reach by allowing it to connect to other networks to form a "network of networks".  Dr. Cerf claims he was the first to coin the term for it as "The Internet" (in RFC 675 where he specified the "TCP" protocol).  Drs. Cerf and Kahn co-developed a new network protocol in support of "The Internet", known as "TCP/IP", in 1973.  (Actually, they developed "TCP" in 1973, and split it into two layers in 1977, which was known as "TCP/IP v.3".)  "IP v.6" extends the IP address space, and it was formally approved by the IETF in 1998, but not turned on globally until July 2012.

Dr. Cerf goes on to maintain that he considers the "birth of the Internet" to be precisely January 1, 1983, "when all hosts on all DARPA-sponsored networks converted to TCP/IP protocol."

Dr. Cerf maintains there was international participation in all those Internet design efforts:  "I had non-US help from France, Japan, Norway and distant collaborators in the UK, Italy, Germany....  The IETF is multi-national and has been since at least 1989."

Internet Regulatory/Management Organizations History
The IETF was formed in 1986. Dr. Cerf says Dr. Bob Kahn first urged him to create an "Internet Configuration Control Board" in 1979 -- as the first ever Internet regulatory organization.  It became the "Internet Activities Board" in 1984, and was renamed the "Internet Architecture Board" in 1992.  Cerf adds:  The IAB was created "with the concurrence and leadership of DARPA* program manager, Barry Leiner;" and "the IETF was one of 10 task forces of the Internet Activities Board."

(*Somewhere along the line, "ARPA" was changed to "DARPA" to emphasize it was an agency of the DoD.)

The non-profit ICANN was established in 1998 to undertake the "Internet domain naming" administration and registration (which includes all those ".com" et al. "TLDs", and IP address assignment) that had been the responsibility of USC-ISI.  Early on, all ARPANET and subsequent Internet domain naming, IP address assignment, and protocol parameter documentation was administered by Jon Postel, who was head of a group at the USC-ISI research center in Los Angeles (and a UCLA computer science PhD student under Prof. Kleinrock).