housands of organizations in dozens of countries. A commercial network without connection to the Internet was seriously handicapped. By the early 1990s, the time had come for the Internet to be privatized and opened up. Commercialization at Last The phase-out of NSFnet funding and its replacement by private capital was not entirely smooth. NSFnet itself was operated by private contractors; it was nomi- nally "privatized" in 1990. Advanced Networks and Solutions (ANS) was founded in 1990 [8]. It had three owners. One was the University of Michigan, whose MERIT subsidiary operated a regional network. Another was MCI, which brought bandwidth; the third was IBM, which brought computer equip- ment. In 1991, ANS asked the NSF for permission to provide commercial con- nectivity to the Internet. This would have provided funding to increase the network's speed; by that point the backbone was mostly T1 lines (1.5 Mbps). In that same year, the Commercial Internet Exchange (CIX) was founded; it pro- vided a peering point where commercial TCP/IP network operators could inter- connect without using the NSF backbone, and thus not be subject to the Acceptable Use Policy. ANS thus planned to operate the federally funded NSFnet and its own ANSnet using the same facilities; it was really one network. ANS had a commer- cial unit, ANS CO+RE [9], which received permission to interconnect commer- cial users to the backbone, bypassing the AUP. Other operators wanted the same permission. ANS CO+RE's proposed special status did not go over well with the Internet community. By 1992, NSF wanted to phase out its own funding any- way. So the AUP was ended, and soon the mid-level networks became Internet service providers (ISPs). NYSERNET spun off a commercial entity, PSInet. BBN, which had operated several of the mid-levels on contract, purchased NEARNET, the Bay Area's BARRNET, and the South's SURANET; these became the foundation of BBN Planet, a backbone ISP that eventually became The Great Telecom Meltdown Genuity (whose post-meltdown bank