How This Internet Pioneer Is Striving To Revamp 



The Internet As We Know It
William B. Norton, Co-Founder of NOIA Network, who has experienced some of the Internet’s critical stages of development first-hand since the 1980s.

NOIA
The Internet has become an integral part of everyday life, whether people realize it or not. From its humble origins to an unprecedented advance in human capacity, the Internet is a pinnacle of achievement.

Like all achievements, however, the Internet is not perfect. Its core, open protocols were designed decades ago, and performance and security issues have forced many businesses and users to rely on overlay or private networks rather than the public Internet. Similarly, the advent of big tech has sparked debate over the control and controversial use of data within walled gardens.

However, such shortcomings are not without efforts to overcome them -- the Internet is continually evolving.

I had a chance to speak with William B. Norton, Co-Founder of NOIA Network, who has experienced some of the Internet’s critical stages of development first-hand since the 1980s. His insights into the historical and current state of the Internet are enlightening, and his ongoing work with NOIA Network reveals a surging trend to build a better Internet.

If you’re looking for some deep insights and context into where the Internet is today, Bill’s perspective is a must-read.

Joresa Blount: You’ve been a pioneer in peering technologies and the Internet’s protocol design for decades with co-founder roles at Equinix, and now NOIA Network. Can you elaborate on your experience with the early stages of the Internet and how its development, both positive and negative, has manifested itself over the last couple of decades?

Bill Norton: The Internet has gone through a series of transitions over the past decades. I started working on the Internet in 1988 when I wrote the network management software that monitored the core of the Internet, the government-sponsored NSFNET. The friction back then was that, as a government-sponsored activity, commercial ISPs were not allowed to connect.

The NSFNET had an Authorized Use Policy (AUP), allowing only certain supercomputing centers, higher education, and research organizations to connect. As a centrally managed system, there were politics involved (Senators and Congressmen lobbied) in the expansion of site decisions. No Al Gore jokes here -- Al Gore and Richard Boucher were strong advocates for advancing the Internet.

When it became clear the government didn’t need to own and operate the NSFNET for the National Science Foundation-funded organizations to be able to communicate, a transition plan to a commercial Internet was circulated. Instead of an NSFNET connection, regional networks were instead given funds to buy Internet services from one of the many competing Network Service Providers (NSPs) that had connections to Network Access Points (NAPs). These NAPs served as network interconnection points, to ensure that NSF-funded networks on one NSP network could reach NSF-sponsored networks on a competing NSP network. This mandate ensured that NSPs bought into the new architecture -- otherwise, they would not qualify for receiving the NSF funds.

When the NSF-funded traffic became a small part of the commercial operator's traffic, most NSPs pulled out of the NAPs, and the “NSP” designation was abandoned. The generic “Internet Service Provider” designation was used instead, and they interconnected with each other outside of the NAPs.

With the continued exponential growth of the Internet, and with the NSF no longer providing material traffic or funding, what could the NSF do but let the Internet evolve outside of its control. The distributed commercial Internet left the nest.

Joresa: How has the commercial Internet evolved from those early origins, and what does the modern version still need?

Bill: I chaired the NSFNET Regional Technicians meetings during the transition from NSFNET to the commercial Internet and wrote the business plan for a self-sustaining (not government-funded) North American Network Operators Group (NANOG), and I became its first chairman (1995-1998).

As NANOG chair, I worked closely with the ISPs, Internet Exchange Point Operators, and Content Providers, mostly looking for content of interest for the NANOG meetings. Unlike in the NSFNET days, where folks eagerly shared performance issues, new protocols, and new attachments to the Internet, the commercial ISPs did not share openly.

They said, “If I share my new customer attachments, my competitors will be able to cherry-pick my best customers. If I share performance problems and solutions that I find, my competitor’s salespeople will only highlight the problems to discredit my service.”

I learned that commercial operators would do that which is in their own interests, and commercial interests drive less openness. This was a problem for me because I was having a hard time finding engineers able to speak. I also knew, as I know today, that there is more evolution needed, and more light shed on the problems in order for them to be addressed.

During the NANOG breaks, I started noticing pairs of network engineers in the back of the room huddled around their laptops. They were configuring “Peering” sessions between their respective networks. Why? They didn’t want to pay AT&T for their traffic to each other, so they configured their routers to exchange their customer traffic directly instead of sending it through AT&T. By doing so, they don’t have to pay AT&T for that traffic exchange, and it turns out to be faster too!

As more and more of these “Tier 2” networks peered, the dependence of the largest “Tier 1” ISPs decreased.

I understood that commercial interests aren’t all bad. ISPs peer to reduce costs and to provide better connectivity. The Internet gets better connectivity because of this alignment of interests.