Internet Society PRESS RELEASE * * * * * INTERNET SOCIETY TAKES HISTORIC STEPS * * * * * At its first formal meeting, the Internet Society Board of Trustees gathering from all corners of the world in Kobe, Japan, took several historic actions that will significantly affect internetworking worldwide. The Internet Society is an international professional organization established for evolving and extending availability of the techniques and technologies that allow diverse information systems to openly communicate. It also includes the huge network of networks known as the Internet which links millions of users worldwide. These technologies and the Internet are very rapidly evolving and widely viewed as critically important infrastructure. The organization formerly known as the Internet Activities Board was merged into the Internet Society as a body called the Internet Architecture Board (IAB). The IAB evolves the technology of the Internet and develops the series of international standards which are the predominant means today for common open interconnection, management, and use of diverse equipment, networks and applications. Some of the most popular include electronic mail, file transfer, news distribution, remote logon, and knowledge discovery. The Board also decided to establish a cooperative relationship with the Geneva-based U.N. specialized agency known as the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). In conjunction with this action, the Board also decided to establish an advisory liaison relationship between the standards bodies of the two organizations, thus effecting a link between the IAB and the International Telegraph and Telephone Consultative Committee (CCITT). Lastly the ISOC will submit a contribution to the ITU's Plenipotentiary Conference that underscores internetworking as critical infrastructure and the use of the Internet to significantly enhance global telecommunications collaboration. By taking these historic steps, the Board hopes not only to greatly advance the development and use of internetworking technologies and the Internet, but also to stimulate more effective collaboration within the telecommunications field. --------------------------------------------------------------- For further information, contact: Internet Society Secretariat 1895 Preston White Drive, suite 100 Reston VA 22091 USA tel: +1 703 620 8990 fax: +1 703 620 0913 email: <isoc@nri.reston.va.us> --- QM v1.00
THE INTERNET SOCIETY
Abstract
The purpose of this document is to provide a brief
description of the Internet Society and its goals and
objectives. It will function as a professional society to
facilitate, support and promote the evolution and growth of
the Internet as a global research communications
infrastructure. The suggestions and recommendations of all
parties interested in the Internet are solicited to assist in
making the Internet Society robust, productive and
structured to meet the needs of its members.
The Internet Society
The Internet, is a collection of cooperating, interconnected,
multiprotocol networks which supports international
collaboration among thousands of organizations. Because
of its current scope and rapid rate of growth, the Internet
will benefit from a more organized framework to support
its objectives. To this end, an Internet Society is being
formed to foster the voluntary interconnection of computer
networks into a global research and development
communications and information infrastructure. The
Internet Society will not operate the Internet. Internet
operation will continue to be a collaborative activity which
the Society will seek to facilitate. The Society will provide
assistance and support to groups and organizations
involved in the use, operation and evolution of the Internet.
It will provide support for forums in which technical and
operational questions can be discussed and provide
mechanisms through which interested parties can be
informed and educated about the Internet, its function,
use, operation and the interests of its constituents.
Membership
The Internet Society will be a membership organization
with voting individual members and non-voting
institutional members. There will be several classes of
institutional members. The society will produce a
newsletter on a regular basis and hold an annual meeting
to which all members and other interested parties will be
invited. The topics of the annual meeting will vary, but are
expected to focus on current research in networking,
Internet functionality and growth, and other interests of
the Society constituency. All members will receive the
newsletter and an invitation to attend the annual meeting
of the Internet Society.
Membership dues will vary according to class of
membership. The amounts of these dues and the basis on
which they are set will be determined by the Board of
Trustees of the Society and may be revised from time to
time as set forth in the By-Laws.
Charter
The Society will be a non-profit organization and will be
operated for academic, educational, charitable and
scientific purposes among which are:
A. To facilitate and support the technical
evolution of the Internet as a research and
education infrastructure and to stimulate
involvement of the academic, scientific and
engineering communities, among others in the
evolution of the Internet.
B. To educate the academic and scientific
communities and the public concerning the
technology, use and application of the
Internet.
C. To promote scientific and educational
applications of Internet technology for the
benefit of educational institutions at all grade
levels, industry and the public at large.
D. To provide a forum for exploration of new
Internet applications and to foster
collaboration among organizations in their
operation and use of the Internet.
Activities of the Society
a. Support for Internet Technical Evolution
The Internet Activities Board (IAB) has been concerned
with the development and evolution of architectures
supporting the use of multiple protocols in a networked
environment. The Internet Society will incorporate the IAB
and its functions into the operation of the Internet Society.
The Internet Society will work with other interested
organizations to support and assist efforts to evolve the
multiprotocol Internet. The Internet Society will use the
Internet Engineering and Research Task Forces to
stimulate networking research and facilitate the evolution
of the TCP/IP protocol suite and the integration of new
protocol suites (e.g. OSI) into the Internet architecture.
The Internet Society will work actively with parties and
organizations interested in fostering improvement in the
utility of the Internet for its constituent users.
b. Meetings and Conferences
Internet Society will convene an annual meeting and will
organize and facilitate workshops and symposia, jointly
with other organizations where appropriate, on specific
topics of interest to the Society membership. The annual
meeting will address issues of global and regional
importance to the evolution and growth of the Internet. In
particular, future INET conferences will be incorporated
into the Society's annual meetings.
c. Information and Infrastructure Services
The Internet Society will publish an Internet Newsletter
providing members with information about the
international activities of Internet constituents. In
addition, the Society will also provide assistance to and
support for organizations responsible for maintaining the
databases crucial to Internet function (e.g. the Domain
Name System, X.500 Directory Services, etc.) and
organizations concerned with the security of the Internet
(e.g. the Software Engineering Institute Computer
Emergency Response Team (CERT) and its CERT-System).
The Society will assist in the development of educational,
advisory and informative materials of use to Society
members. Where appropriate, the Society will organize or
support activities which aid in the coordination among the
organizations operating components of the Internet.
The Society will refer members to appropriate parties
involved in operating the various parts of the Internet
where they may be helpful with specific questions. Where
possible, the Society would seek to provide access to its
information on-line, but would also offer hard copy and,
perhaps eventually, CD-ROM-based information resources.
Plans
The initial organizers of the Internet Society include the
Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI),
EDUCOM and the Internet Activities Board. During the
six month period from June - December 1991, the
organizers will work with interested parties to prepare for
beginning operation of the Society by the end of 1991.
Computer networking has become a critical infrastructure
for the research and development community and has the
potential to become the basis for world-wide collaboration
and cooperation in every field of human endeavor. The
Internet Society will seek to solidify, enhance and
encourage further international collaborative networking.
Individuals joining the Society during its formation will
receive special recognition as Society pioneers and will
have the opportunity to shape the early agenda of Society
activities. Opportunities for organizational and
institutional participation are also available.
It is time. The technology is available. A global renaissance
of scientific and technical cooperation is at hand. You are
cordially invited to take part in an enterprise without
precedent and an adventure without boundary. The
Internet Society sets sail in January of 1992 on a voyage of
internetwork discovery. Will you be aboard?
APPENDIX
A Brief History of the Internet and Related Networks
Introduction
In 1973, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency (DARPA) initiated a research program to
investigate techniques and technologies for interlinking
packet networks of various kinds. The objective was to
develop communication protocols which would allow
networked computers to communicate transparently across
multiple, linked packet networks. This was called the
Internetting project and the system of networks which
emerged from the research was known as the "Internet".
The system of protocols which was developed over the
course of this research effort became known as the TCP/IP
Protocol Suite, after the two initial protocols developed:
Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Internet Protocol
(IP).
In 1986, the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF)
initiated the development of the NSFNET which, today,
provides a major backbone communication service for the
Internet. With its 45 megabit per second facilities, the
NSFNET carries on the order of 7 billion packets per
month between the networks it links. The National
Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the
U.S. Department of Energy contributed additional
backbone facilities in the form of the NSINET and ESNET
respectively. In Europe, major international backbones
such as NORDUNET and others provide connectivity to
tens of thousands of computers on a large number of
networks. Commercial network providers in the U.S. and
Europe are beginning to offer Internet backbone and access
support on a competitive basis to any interested parties.
"Regional" support for the Internet is provided by various
consortium networks and "local" support is provided
through each of the research and educational institutions.
Within the United States, much of this support has come
from the federal and state governments, but a considerable
contribution has been made by industry. In Europe and
elsewhere, support arises from cooperative international
efforts and through national research organizations.
During the course of its evolution, particularly after 1989,
the Internet system began to integrate support for other
protocol suites into its basic networking fabric. The present
emphasis in the system is on multiprotocol interworking,
and in particular, with the integration of the Open Systems
Interconnection (OSI) protocols into the architecture.
Both public domain and commercial implementations of the
roughly 100 protocols of TCP/IP protocol suite became
available in the 1980's. During the early 1990's, OSI
protocol implementations also became available and, by the
end of 1990, the Internet has grown to include some 5,000
networks in over two dozen countries, serving over 315,000
host computers used by as many as 3,000,000 people.
Much of the support for the Internet community has come
from the U.S. Federal Government, since the Internet was
originally part of a federally-funded research program and,
subsequently, has become a major part of the U.S. research
infrastructure. During the late 1980s, however, the
population of Internet users and network constituents
expanded internationally and began to include commercial
facilities. Indeed, the bulk of the system today is made up
of private networking facilities in educational and research
institutions, businesses and in government organizations
across the globe.
The Coordinating Committee for Intercontinental Networks
(CCIRN), which was organized by the U.S. Federal
Networking Council (FNC) and the European Reseaux
Associees pour la Recherche Europeenne (RARE), plays an
important role in the coordination of plans for government-
sponsored research networking. CCIRN efforts have been
a stimulus for the support of international cooperation in
the Internet environment.
Internet Technical Evolution
Over its fifteen year history, the Internet has functioned as
a collaboration among cooperating parties. Certain key
functions have been critical for its operation, not the least
of which is the specification of the protocols by which the
components of the system operate. These were originally
developed in the DARPA research program mentioned
above, but in the last five or six years, this work has been
undertaken on a wider basis with support from
Government agencies in many countries, industry and the
academic community. The Internet Activities Board (IAB)
was created in 1983 to guide the evolution of the TCP/IP
Protocol Suite and to provide research advice to the
Internet community.
During the course of its existence, the IAB has reorganized
several times. It now has two primary components: the
Internet Engineering Task Force and the Internet
Research Task Force. The former has primary
responsibility for further evolution of the TCP/IP protocol
suite, its standardization with the concurrence of the IAB,
and the integration of other protocols into Internet
operation (e.g. the Open Systems Interconnection
protocols). The Internet Research Task Force continues to
organize and explore advanced concepts in networking
under the guidance of the Internet Activities Board and
with support from various government agencies.
A secretariat has been created to manage the day-to-day
function of the Internet Activities Board and Internet
Engineering Task Force. IETF meets three times a year in
plenary and its approximately 50 working groups convene
at intermediate times by electronic mail, teleconferencing
and at face-to-face meetings. The IAB meets quarterly face-
to-face or by videoconference and at intervening times by
telephone, electronic mail and computer-mediated
conferences.
Two other functions are critical to IAB operation:
publication of documents describing the Internet and the
assignment and recording of various identifiers needed for
protocol operation. Throughout the development of the
Internet, its protocols and other aspects of its operation
have been documented first in a series of documents called
Internet Experiment Notes and, later, in a series of
documents called Requests for Comment (RFCs). The latter
were used initially to document the protocols of the first
packet switching network developed by DARPA, the
ARPANET, beginning in 1969, and have become the
principal archive of information about the Internet. At
present, the publication function is provided by an RFC
editor.
The recording of identifiers is provided by the Internet
Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) who has delegated
one part of this responsibility to an Internet Registry
which acts as a central repository for Internet information
and which provides central allocation of network and
autonomous system identifiers, in some cases to subsidiary
registries located in various countries. The Internet
Registry (IR) also provides central maintenance of the
Domain Name System (DNS) root database which points to
subsidiary distributed DNS servers replicated throughout
the Internet. The DNS distributed database is used, inter
alia, to associate host and network names with their
Internet addresses and is critical to the operation of the
higher level TCP/IP protocols including electronic mail.
There are a number of Network Information Centers
(NICs) located throughout the Internet to serve its users
with documentation, guidance, advice and assistance. As
the Internet continues to grow internationally, the need for
high quality NIC functions increases. Although the initial
community of users of the Internet were drawn from the
ranks of computer science and engineering, its users now
comprise a wide range of disciplines in the sciences, arts,
letters, business, military and government administration.
Related Networks
In 1980-81, two other networking projects, BITNET and
CSNET, were initiated. BITNET adopted the IBM RSCS
protocol suite and featured direct leased line connections
between participating sites. Most of the original BITNET
connections linked IBM mainframes in university data
centers. This rapidly changed as protocol implementations
became available for other machines. From the beginning,
BITNET has been multi-disciplinary in nature with users
in all academic areas. It has also provided a number of
unique services to its users (e.g., LISTSERV). Today,
BITNET and its parallel networks in other parts of the
world (e.g., EARN in Europe) have several thousand
participating sites. In recent years, BITNET has
established a backbone which uses the TCP/IP protocols
with RSCS-based applications running above TCP.
CSNET was initially funded by the National Science
Foundation (NSF) to provide networking for university,
industry and government computer science research
groups. CSNET used the Phonenet MMDF protocol for
telephone-based electronic mail relaying and, in addition,
pioneered the first use of TCP/IP over X.25 using
commercial public data networks. The CSNET name server
provided an early example of a white pages directory
service and is still in use at numerous sites. At its peak,
CSNET had approximately 200 participating sites and
international connections to approximately fifteen
countries. Today, CSNET still provides services to a
number of industrial sites and small colleges.
In 1987, BITNET and CSNET merged to form the
Corporation for Research and Educational Networking
(CREN). A key feature of CREN and its predecessors is
that they were entirely dependent on voluntary user fees;
