Summary

  • CIX’s board announced that its router would stop advertising routes from nonmembers, with a grace period for pending applications and an exemption for majority-owned affiliates.
  • The board also cited limits in the shared router and recommended private interconnection; the surviving announcement proves the policy and schedule, not the exact reach of enforcement.

On 30 January 1994, a prospective network reseller asked a question that sounds larger than the router it concerned: if CIX membership did not connect a provider to the NSF backbone, was it missing half the Internet? NANOG participant Elise Gerich answered with a narrower definition. CIX membership meant connectivity to CIX members; it did not automatically make one member a transit provider for every nonmember. The exchange exposed a boundary that was easy to miss when “the Internet” was discussed as one connected thing.

By that year the Commercial Internet eXchange had become more than a line between three providers. The October 1992 Internet Monthly Report counted about 1,140 networks within CIX membership as using CIX-West and published traffic totals for AlterNet, CERFnet, PSINet and SprintLink. That is a dated measurement of networks using a particular exchange, not a count of all CIX members or a 1994 capacity test. But it gives scale to a service whose value depended on route information being exchanged at a common point.

CIX had been built around a simple bargain: members would interconnect without charging one another by traffic volume. In 1994, however, the association faced a question that the bargain did not erase. Who should receive route advertisement through a facility financed by membership dues? An October 1994 account by Gary Wolf reported that annual dues had fallen from US$10,000 to US$7,500, that payment had previously been treated voluntarily, and that the association had decided in July to stop unpaid networks’ traffic at the CIX router. Smaller providers objected. The dispute was not over a price for each packet.

It was over whether a network could continue to use a shared routing service without paying the association that maintained it.

On 1 November, CIX president Bob Collet sent members the board’s implementation notice. Nonmember routes would be filtered at the router beginning 15 November. Providers whose applications were already in process would have through the end of 1994 to pay. A provider at least 51 per cent owned by a CIX member did not need separate membership. The first filter would apply by autonomous system, with individual routes to follow where a member’s AS also carried routes from nonmembers. The board said it would contact affected networks before applying those later filters.

That detail matters because a route is not the same thing as a company. One autonomous system can announce address space used by multiple commercial arrangements. Filtering only by AS could therefore be too broad; filtering individual prefixes required identifying which routes belonged to which network. The board’s sequence shows an effort to translate an organizational rule into routing configuration without treating every route inside a member’s AS as automatically covered.

The letter framed the policy as fairness to members paying for route advertisement. It also described what the rule did not reach. Members already peering privately at MAE-East, or planning to interconnect at the NSF-sponsored Network Access Points and through PacBell or Bell Atlantic SMDS, sat outside the CIX router framework. Those links would be governed by private bilateral agreements. The board recommended those alternatives because it saw inherent scaling limits in a router-based exchange point.

On 2 November the board went further, proposing to move router management to a nonmember vendor and, if members agreed, decommission the router by the end of the first quarter of 1995. The proposal cited throughput and physical diversity and described the marginal benefit of the central router as small once other national and global interconnections were available. It is a proposal, not a record that the router was decommissioned on that date. The distinction reveals a service in transition: CIX could keep its association and policy work while the physical act of interconnection shifted to other facilities and bilateral arrangements.

The record therefore supports neither “CIX shut nonmembers off from the Internet” nor “the filter was only symbolic.” The board announced a rule for route advertisement at its own router, with a staged schedule and defined exceptions. A contemporary Wired report said most networks could still exchange traffic without passing through that router, while warning that members might change their arrangements in ways that made access harder. Reachability depended on the wider set of routes and agreements, not on one association’s device alone.

That boundary is the useful history. A shared exchange can lower the coordination cost of connecting many networks, and a no-volume-settlement bargain can make traffic predictable for members. Yet the exchange still has an operator, costs, capacity limits and an admission rule. In 1994 CIX tried to make those costs legible by tying its route-advertisement service to membership, even as it advised members to build paths that no longer depended on the central router.

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