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Conception

The Commercial Internet Exchange (CIX) was the initial effort for creating the commercial Internet that we know today. It's goal was to have an independent interconnection point with no US Government "" on the traffic that could flow, as critical, was the "no-settlement" policy that was to exist between the parties. This no-settlement policy which has been an assumed "given" throughout the modern era of the Internet was immensely controversial at this point in time.

The first meetings were held in Reston, Virginia, and the original signatories were PSINet, UUNET, CERFnet. The original hardware that comprised the technical interconnection of the CIX was placed in the Smithsonian in early 2006, it like most of the technology for providing the Internet in the early 90's was Cisco gear.

The Opposition

Up until this moment the Internet had been dominated by the US Government agencies such as ARPA/DARPA through the Arpanet, the Defense Communications Agencey (DCA) through the MILNET, the National Science Foundation (NSF) through the NSFNet, and the NSF sponsored US and Canadian "Regional Networks", as well as a handful of national networks sponsored by various national entities and the NSF. The focus of this group was either Military/Government communications or Research Communications especially about the separately funded NSF SuperComputer initiatives brought on by Nobel Laurete Ken Wilson's testimony to Congress in the 1980's.

The NSF chose a vendor and a model on its own iniative to do commercialization using the same infrastructure as the NSFNet called ANS (Advanced Network Services) led by IBM Yorktown Heights. While the conflict was apparent to some it was not to the NSF. More importantly the NSF and ANS had a settlement model which they believed would provide for an Internet for themselves and commercial entities, this settlement model was based on how many bytes of data were sent to you. This model had great advantages to those who provided servers in the center of the Internet which of course was the situation that the NSFNet and ANS happened to be in.

This "great debate" was had in very select forums amongst very select parties until the establishment of the "com-priv" public mailing list at PSInet (specifically com-priv@psi.com). On this list the concept of the CIX was disclosed and debated.

The Great "Compromise"

With the CIX gaining more and more commercial ISP's quarter by quarter and then month by month, and with the NSFNet/ANSNet building traffic based on its University usage, a "compromise" was needed. At that point Mitch Kapor took over the chairmanship from Marty Schoffstall and forged an agreement with ANS to connect to the CIX as a "trial" by which they could leave with a moment's notice.

Eventually the CIX model was adopted by all interconnection points throughout the world.