Timeline milestone
The Internet backbone shifts toward commercial service
From How the Internet Was Built: From Four Computers to a Global Network
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Commercialisation
The Internet backbone shifts toward commercial service
NSF retired NSFNET’s backbone as commercial providers took over general connectivity in the United States.
Through the early 1990s, the main U.S. Internet backbone was still NSFNET, a network funded by the National Science Foundation primarily for research and education, with restrictions on the general commercial traffic it could carry. NSF retired the NSFNET backbone and shifted general connectivity onto backbones operated by commercial Internet service providers, ending federal operation of the network's central U.S. infrastructure. The transition let ordinary businesses and consumers connect without routing through a research-funded backbone, and it is the shift that made the mid-to-late 1990s commercial Internet, and the dot-com era that followed, structurally possible.
