Commercial Internet E Xchange - The Great Compromise

The Great Compromise

The CIX was growing as more and more commercial ISPs connected. NSFNET traffic continued growing based on research and education usage. ANS CO+RE was carrying commercial traffic. But ANS refused to connect to the CIX and the CIX refused to purchase a connection to ANS. Thus it was not always possible for organizations connected to one provider to exchange traffic with other organizations connected via a different provider.

A "compromise" was needed in order to maintain a fully interconnected Internet. Mitch Kapor took over the CIX chairmanship from Marty Schoffstall and in June 1992 forged an agreement with ANS allowing ANS to connect to the CIX as a "trial" that they could leave with a moment's notice and without having to become a CIX member. This compromise resolved things for a time, but later the CIX started to block access from regional networks that had not paid the $10,000 fee to become members of the CIX.

This unfortunate state of affairs kept the networking community as a whole from fully implementing the true vision for the Internet--a world-wide network of fully interconnected TCP/IP networks allowing any connected site to communicate with any other connected site. These problems would not be fully resolved until a new network architecture was developed and the NSFNET Backbone Service was turned off in 1995.