Mark Nichols – Internet Globalization & eCommerce Pioneer

In my book, How I Made the Web World Wide, I chronicle my journey as co-founder of Digital Island, a pioneering Internet infrastructure startup launched in 1996.

With a bold vision, our team raised $779 million to forge a global telecommunications network that transformed worldwide connectivity and ignited a financial revolution. In swift succession, this framework enabled the most transformative event in human history: the globalization of eCommerce.

This marked the pivotal moment in human history when, for the first time, people could exchange money securely and instantly across borders globally, without physical presence, and without barriers. It immediately transformed humanity from a collection of independent financial civilizations into a single, synchronized, self-aware economic species. The world’s economy was fundamentally reset with the speed of a DNS update.

Digital Island’s network achieved unprecedented speed and scale, affecting billions simultaneously. It democratized opportunity and wealth creation more broadly and quickly than any prior event. It unified all prior revolutions into a single, instantaneous, planetary economic organism.

The world’s commerce, trade, finance, distribution, education, human communications, and the many other Internet-centric applications were measurably, globally, and irreversibly different after the Digital Island network went live.

The Vision and Funding

Envision 1996, and contemplate the illustration below wherein the blue lines delineate the service areas of regional Internet providers (e.g., France Telecom, Japan Telecom, Singapore Telecom, Deutsche Telekom), while the red lines, representing the oceanic and terrestrial fiber optics of International Private Line Circuits (IPLCs) that I contracted for and put into service, thereby linking every major metro with an Internet presence around the world.

In my role, I spearheaded the global eCommerce business initiative, which included developing the financial pro forma. This involved projecting key metrics such as revenue and expenses, forecasting anticipated financial performance and growth to optimize prospective shareholder returns, and designing the initial network architecture.

During this period, I also negotiated and signed a hosting contract with Cisco Systems for their website (Cisco.com). This key achievement was leveraged to secure our seed capital from Cliff Higgerson formerly at ComVentures and currently at Walden International.

With vision, plan, and funding in place, I acquired infrastructure to connect the world’s major ISPs and 95% of Internet users seamlessly. This created the first IP-based global WAN using IPLCs (international private line circuits), with QoS guarantees under 300ms round-trip, realizing Internet, Web, and eCommerce globalization. This is the story of How I Made the Web World Wide.

Key Achievements of Our Network

This book explains how our new global network enabled:

1. The globalization of eCommerce with Visa, MasterCard, Charles Schwab, and E*Trade.
2. The first internet peering connectivity with the People’s Republic of China, which I contracted for during my travels to Beijing to negotiate the terms of service with the Minister of Telecom, Professor Xing Li of Tsinghua University.
3. The globalization of eLearning and ePublishing with Stanford University.
4. The largest media streaming network in the world with Microsoft, Intel, and Compaq.
5. The first global Content Delivery Network (CDN), aka Local Content Manager.
6. The first Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) on-demand allocation of bandwidth over the internet, aka Reservation Resource Protocol (RSVP).
7. In 1996, when I negotiated and signed a service contract with Cisco Systems to host Cisco.com, they were the 587th largest company in the USA. Three years later they became the most valuable company in the world while employing our network to scale their growth.
8. The award and recognition as the world’s first Cisco Powered Network, which became the worldwide internetworking industry benchmark.
9. The internet access platform that the Google’s founders used to build the first repository of search results while they were graduate school students at Stanford University in 1998 (google.stanford.edu) as we were Stanford’s ISP starting 1Q 1997.
10. Traceware, a patented algorithm, developed together with Stanford University’s HighWire Press. This technology leverages real-time data processing to automate regulatory compliance for global media, addressing both regional and localized requirements.

The Genesis Network Diagram

The image below is the genesis network diagram to globalize the Internet, drawn by me, Mark Nichols, in June of 1996. The document conceptualizes the Points of Presence (PoPs) for the first Internet-centric global wide-area networking of AsiaPac, the Americas, Western Europe, and the unnamed PoPs representing the Rest of World (RoW). This rendering precedes the application filing of our company business license by 4 months.

In the second quarter of 1996, as we began posturing our planned services, a mere ≈75k commercially viable websites existed worldwide (I’m excluding adult-themed content sites) for productive apps like email, info sharing, and commerce. Bereft of the necessary investment to attain a mechanical and physical presence as a truly global platform, the Internet itself awaited the activation of our network in the last week of December 1996.

To enable the vast array of both existing and emergent Internet technologies and anticipate the expected exponential growth, doing so required us to acquire entirely distinct elements of:

• Global Physical Presence:
  • Data Center/Point of Presence (PoP) Facilities in every key metro area.
  • Power, cooling, and facility redundancies (e.g., HVAC, power systems).
• Networking & Interconnection:
  • Physical switch and routing equipment,
  • Fiber optic cables and backbone connections.
  • Dedicated Peering Ports with every Tier 1 ISP (strategic alternative to public IXPs/NAPs).
• Hosting & Hardware:
  • Server infrastructure (for hosting, content mirroring, and CDN).
• Software & Security:
  • Vast amounts of software and data collection structures,
  • Domain Name System (DNS) infrastructure,
  • Security appliances and licenses.
• Commercial & Financial:
  • Legal viability,
  • Negotiating and maintaining complex localized peering and interconnection agreements,
  • Highly specialized expert human capital,
  • Paying customers,
  • And billions of dollars of speculative capital aimed at delivering positive returns for shareholders.

Over the next several years, the words ‘Internet’ and ‘Web’ morphed into figurative terms used in a broader context than the stack of software systems that they really are. Though this isn’t technically the correct use of the words, they have become colloquially applied to describe the application of software technologies when used in large-scale physical telecommunications networking infrastructure platforms.

Think of it this way:

1. The Internet is the entire global postal system (roads, planes, sorting facilities, post offices, mail trucks).
2. IP is the address written on the envelope.
3. TCP is the certified mail service that ensures you get a signature and re-sends the letter if it gets lost.
4. WWW is the specific type of content being sent (like a magazine or catalog) built to be easily read by anyone.

To clarify: The “internet” is a vast network of connected networks, not the TCP/IP telecommunications protocol suite. The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), part of the TCP/IP suite, is simply a popular protocol that helps facilitate packet delivery which provides reliability features like retransmission for lost packets due to errors or congestion.

In hindsight, I think a better naming convention for TCP is the “Packet Delivery Assurance Protocol” for internet-centric transmissions. To be clear, the TCP protocol is used over on the internet in a mid-layer function to contribute to assurance of packet delivery; TCP is not the internet.

The Internet Protocol (IP) addresses packets between endpoints. In hindsight, I think a better naming convention for IP is the “Packet Address Label Protocol” for internet-centric transmissions. To be clear, the IP protocol is used over on the internet in a mid-layer function to address packets; IP is not the internet.

The World Wide Web (WWW) is an information-sharing system built on top of the internet, leveraging TCP/IP to deliver some internet content (text and images) in user-friendly ways accessible to non-experts beyond computer scientists. Importantly, the WWW is optional for internet use and irrelevant to many other functions, such as email, file transfers, and data transport.

In hindsight, I think a better naming convention for WWW is the “Content Sharing Protocol” for the instances where you want to link content from a host to a viewer. To be clear, the WWW protocols are used over the internet in a later-stage (higher layer) function of the internet when linking webpages and documents between users; WWW is not the internet.

Note that while protocols like TCP offer delivery assurance, the overall system (built on TCP, IP, and higher layers like WWW) cannot guarantee end-to-end delivery in cases of underlying network failures, such as fiber cuts, outages, lack of diverse and redundant routes, or failures in supporting facilities (e.g. power systems or cooling). The digital revolution wasn’t just a story of software ingenuity, it stemmed from ambitious, costly infrastructure investments that built the internet as we know it. Once again, TCP/IP and WWW are not the internet, despite widespread media portrayals and personal representations to “fathering and birthing the Internet” and other misleading labels and sobriquets.

On August 5, 1996, I contractually joined together with Ron and Sanne Higgins to create Digital Island; we were now an enterprise of 3 people. Though we weren’t a business entity as of yet, because the application for the business license was still a month out from being applied for. You can see that image nine paragraphs down.

At this time I was working without being paid an income. Though we had an employment contract at the time, in lieu of cash compensation I accrued a future “prorated stock equivalent” in a company that did not yet have municipal legality, corporate registration, nor securities assets.

For the record, though there was talk of an investor, at this time there was no existent company business license or fictitious business name filing, thus there was no way to open a business bank account to deposit such funds, nor was there a stock instrument in place to securitize an investor.

Subsequently, we received investor money three months later, but only after I acquired our first customer, Cisco Systems. Within days of my negotiating and signing the service agreement, ComVentures wrote us a check for $300K in angel financing, establishing their intention to lead the forthcoming first round of $3.5M in our Series A. With the angel funding in hand, our newly onboarded CFO then initiated providing our founding team with company paychecks and employee benefits for the first time.

The network illustration below I created as an evolution of the one above. I attached this diagram as an addendum to the service agreement with Cisco Systems for our hosting the Cisco.com website that I negotiated and signed on November 7, 1996. You can see that contract two paragraphs down.

Note to peers: The frame relay (aka frame) network was swapped out to clear channel (aka International Private Line Circuits, or IPLCs) after our proof of concept in Q4 1996. The inherent vice of frame is that it doesn’t offer Quality of Service (QoS) for latency or security. We made the decision in mid-September of 1996 that we would modify our mission statement and attempt to globalize eCommerce with secure transactional services that I refer to as Merchant Transport; there’s more about this nine paragraphs down.

The Cisco Contract aka Our Franchise Document and Meal Ticket

On November 7, 1996, I secured a landmark contract to host Cisco.com, a triumph that stood as a defining milestone for our fledgling, 60-day-old, three-person startup, and which set the stage for our global ascent.

Collaborating with Cisco’s Lance Perry (VP of IT) and Herve Goguely (formerly the Senior Director of Global Service Management), we aligned on vision and execution. Their insights helped me to productize our proposed hosting services, build a robust financial model, set clear QoS metrics for service terms, and then culminate in our signing the agreement at Cisco’s headquarters.

This contract, a proof of concept for Digital Island’s vision, secured $300,000 in angel financing and catalyzed $779 million in further investments. We rapidly recruited top talent to spearhead infrastructure procurement, deployment, and internetworking, building a global internet backbone in 1996’s emerging digital landscape.

The 1996 Cisco Hosting Contract Productized, Priced, QoS & SLAs Defined, Legal Terms Negotiated, and Contractually Binding by Mark Nichols.

Without this Contract, Digital Island and the Globalization of the Internet and e-Commerce Doesn’t Exist Past Fairyland.

At the start of 1996, Cisco ranked #587 in the US Fortune 1000 for revenue value. Three years later in 1999, Cisco became the world’s most valuable company. Founded in 1984, Cisco achieved this level of success for the first time in history when an Internet company ranked as the #1 most valuable company in the USA and the world, and they accomplished it in just 15 years from startup. During this time we were the web hosting contractor and ISP for Cisco, which provided that global scalability.

As noted in the renderings above, to enable our change in mission statement for eCommerce, in Q1 of 1997 we pivoted to swapping out the frame relay ports in Hawaii for all new IPLCs demarcated to the Stanford University data center.

It is important to note that on September 6, 1996, the business was originally intended as a Pacific Rim-centric hosting and translation services entity focused on American content written in English to be translated into Japanese/Mandarin/Cantonese for the Pacific Rim markets.

Ron initially defined the intent of the enterprise as a ‘Digital Publisher Service in the Pacific Rim,’ but that business model changed significantly within weeks of this municipal filing. See the filing with the Hawaii Department of Commerce below.

For the business application originally conceived above, the initial use of frame was preferred due to lower costs from the shared customer utility of line capacity; as frame is managed by the carrier, not the customer, and frame has an inherent burstable-capable design.

Thus, for the digital publishing services company that Digital Island originally aspired to become, frame was the fastest way to market, the least expensive, had an immediately scalable architecture, and there was no engineering requirement for us to create our own team of network engineering and management, but this plan was very short-lived.

The Birth of the Globalization of eCommerce

During my visit to Hawaii with Ron and Sanne in the second week of September, we expanded the network design, expenses, and degree of difficulty to build and manage our own network, with the intensified goal of enabling Merchant Transport and the effective globalization of eCommerce.

The image is an email from Sanne, Ron’s wife and our Director of Communications, addressed to me on September 18, 1996, just 12 days after Ron’s business license filing for our “Digital Publishing Service in the Pacific Rim.” In the email, Sanne requests a copy of my proposed “Merchant Transport” financial services idea to incorporate into her marketing materials, which I had previously shared with Ron during our dinner conversation a few nights earlier.

The Caterpillar to Butterfly Transformation

How Did the Caterpillar Become a Butterfly?

Now visualize:

1. Take away the red lines, that’s the “Internet caterpillar” of 1996. This is before the first global network to facilitate seamless end-to-end internet access to all major metros and Internet-available service areas around the world.

Imagine an “Internet” where Rostelecom in Russia was not connected to Embratel in Brazil, Malaysia Telecom was not connected to Telefonica in Spain, Korea Telecom was not connected to NetVision in Israel, HiNet in Taiwan was not connected to Imaginet in France, Telstra in Australia was not connected to Deutsche Telekom in Germany, and China was simply operating on a single 64 kilobit intranet (64 Kb is a single telephone line of capacity) shared among their 300 member universities with a single 64 Kb to SprintLink.

The timing of user adoption rates was a key issue here. The economies of scale for globalization had not yet been financially viable, as no solution existed to generate shareholder returns on such a large worldwide networking endeavor.

Without seamless global connectivity, the Internet Protocol suite, which enables the World Wide Web application layer protocol software code, does not support internetworking usage outside of local hosts, regional footprints, and limited peering relationships.

Consequently, ISPs and enterprises that were using the TCP/IP/WWW software primarily applied it within their corporate or regional-wide networks, aka intranets.

Therefore, the potential and suggested usefulness of the Internet and WWW software protocol applications, with only their regional or private corporate implementations, remained uncertain, and thus, the internet protocols were serving merely as the “Internet and World Wide Web” in software title only.

At the time, worldwide utilization could have been achieved with the software protocols, but at the beginning of 1996 no one had yet implemented the TCP/IP/WWW protocols into service on a single, end-to-end, autonomous global network.

In 1996, when I began building this network, ISPs were territory-focused within their own regional network infrastructure. An example is France Telecom and Japan Telecom, that mostly service French and Japanese businesses and consumers, respectively. They offer services only for Internet access to content within their sphere of influence and limited peering relationships, which physically limits their network footprint and electronically compromises the customers’ access to content beyond their network intranet.

You could have a website or web-centric application anywhere in the world, but that does not mean everybody in the world could access or use it. By design, regional ISPs did not guarantee access to content outside of their networks, especially to content in other countries or stored in networks located on other continents. Prior to our network roll-out, Quality of Service (QoS) for the internet did not exist before we guaranteed 300 milliseconds (aka 3/10th of 1 second) round-trip to anywhere in the world at any time. Our network QoS enforcement is what enabled our ability to globalize eCommerce.

2. Now put the red lines back in, that’s the “internet butterfly” infrastructure metamorphosis of globalization that we started in 1996. Keep in mind that the butterfly is co-dependent on the caterpillar stage. These global private lines that I acquired spanned the world and created the first global ISP backbone, interconnecting all major regional ISPs within each metro, thus this network metamorphosis is what realized the full capability of the internet suite of software protocols.

By January 1999, the Digital Island network had connected all the world’s major ISPs that were currently available for internet connectivity, including those in England, France, the Netherlands, Germany, Spain, Russia, Israel, Mexico, Brazil, Australia, Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Beijing, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Canada, Miami, New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, Virginia, Seattle, Honolulu, Palo Alto, and Santa Clara.

From a historical perspective, the solutions introduced above were a new market opportunity because our global network services did not exist prior to our company start-up, and thus, we were able to contract to host and broadcast the websites to 881 customers in under four years from our company’s inception.

These clients included Cisco Systems, Stanford University, Microsoft, Google, Visa, Intel, Compaq, Hewlett Packard, eTrade, Charles Schwab, Novell, National Semiconductor, MasterCard, Sun Microsystems, Sandpiper Networks, NetGravity, Canon, AristaSoft, Universal Music Group, ABN Amro, UBS Warburg, Digital River, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, EBSCO Publishing, Fox Broadcasting, ZDnet, Reuters, Kenneth Cole, MSNBC, Major League Baseball, Time Warner-Road Runner, AOL, CNBC, JP Morgan Chase, Sony, Bloomberg, and over 850 others.

Note that with 881 customers in four years and with 220 business days a year, our customer acquisition rate averaged one new customer every business day for four years.

With the above in mind, to accomplish our goals we would need to connect all of the Tier One ISPs around the world that were actively participating in Internet services. By connecting all of the Tier 1 telecom ISPs worldwide, we would become the world’s first “Tier 0” carrier/ISP. Although the term “Tier 0” is not technically used by tradition, it serves conveniently to describe our efforts to organize the legacy Tier 1 incumbents worldwide.

Therefore, our business statement and executive summary aimed to position us as the network services tier above them. It was also the foundation for acquiring our customers, investors, service providers, and highly specialized human collateral to make it all materialize.

What we believed was that you can dream as much as you want, code as much protocol software as required, and raise as much money as you can, but eventually, highly qualified and valuable individuals must choose to join your company, perform the work that transforms emergent technology into a service, and then provide the ongoing and scalable support for all of it.

It was the people who created the networking inventions—and those who made the investments, the installations, and the career commitments—who are the people that sparked the revolution of information sharing and, in doing so, contributed to changing the way people communicate and transact.

The Start of $779 Million Dollars in Venture Capital and 881 Customer Acquisitions in Four Years

The following content on this site will provide a brief overview of how the financial and commercial sectors became involved in my team’s entrepreneurial journey, which started with the creation and assembly of a business case, network architecture, customer acquisitions, specialized human capital, and a $779 million speculative venture capital investment.

Beginning in 1996, we started making this investment to fully realize the potential of those software code protocols, originally written and intended for worldwide implementation twenty-two years prior for TCP/IP and six years prior for WWW.

Below is our company’s first press release announcing the above services contract to host the Cisco Systems web site and the announcement of our ‘NEW GLOBAL NETWORK,’ January 1997.

Stanford University: Our Customer, Our Partner in Patented Innovations, and a Data Center Service Provider to Us

We acquired our second customer, Stanford University, for the enablement and distribution of their e-Publication and e-Learning services. Prior to this press release, I had already initiated our first California network POP on the Stanford campus in January of 1997.

Stanford was one of the first two nodes of the internet, along with UCLA, in 1969, and we were now hosting and broadcasting their website on our global network in 1997. Consider the magnitude of the value proposition of our global network, such that Stanford and Cisco were our first two clients. Our services also included providing Stanford with the Internet platform that the founders of Google used for upstream ISP connections to build the first repository of Google search results while the founders were graduate school students at Stanford University in 1998 (google.stanford.edu).

With Cisco and Stanford on-boarded, the world of technology and finance began to take very serious notice.

E*Trade Invests After Becoming a Customer

The press release for our ETrade customer acquisition, investment, and board seat is below. Prior to this, we had Visa on-network since 1997, and it was only a few months later that we brought online Charles Schwab and MasterCard. Seamless and global eCommerce with Visa, MasterCard, Charles Schwab, and ETrade was all simultaneously available on a six-continent scale, in effect for the first time in every major metro worldwide and only available on our network.

And thus, from these milestone achievements, we enabled the globalization of eCommerce.

Providence of Startup Servers and Business Development Travels

For a little trip down memory lane, the three images below are the original receipts for the first tranche of SunMicro servers we acquired to build our global network and make the web worldwide. The shipping dates are September and October 1996.

Note that the shipping of the servers is addressed to my residence in Alamo, CA, because I’m still working from home until we received our $3.5M A round investment in February. With that funding, I then contracted for 14,000 sq. ft. of office space in San Francisco’s Embarcadero for us to facilitate the first 100 employees.

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The following images are a sampling of the pages from my passport, which document my business development travels to acquire the infrastructure to build our global network.

The first image below, with the blue square outline on the right side from Beijing, is the date stamp of my travels to visit with the Minister of Telecom (Professor Xing Li, Tsinghua University) to negotiate and contract for the first Internet peering with the People’s Republic of China, and, more specifically, to access the China Education and Research Network (CERNET).

At that time, China accounted for 18% of the world’s population but had only one telephone line for Internet access and intranet networking, serving the entire country.

To connect China to our network in 1998, I contracted for a submarine and terrestrial cross-continental circuit, which cost my cost center $275,000, prepaid and upfront (not adjusted for inflation). The contract terms required me to pay the circuit and port fees three months in advance.

The short story about peering with China may be found on this website here https://marknichols.com/china

The following press releases are about the data centers I acquired around the world to add to the infrastructure required to build our global network and facilitate what became the world’s largest media streaming network.

If You Want to Use Internet & Web Software You First Have to Have the Hardware

As introduced in the opening paragraphs, Internet protocols are neither the physical Internet nor the Web. To realize the potential of such software authorship, somewhere, somehow, somebody must raise the money to pay for network and telecommunications expenses. The following outlines what Digital Island’s finance team accomplished: which funded the acquisition elements that made the Digital Island global network infrastructure:

$300K Angel Investment, ComVentures, November 1996.

$3.5M Series A, January 1997.

$10.5M Series B, March 1998.

$10.5M Series C, September 1998.

$50M Series D, March 1999.

$60M Initial Public Offering NASDAQ (ISLD). See the image supporting the S1 filing below.

$45M Private Equity investment from Microsoft, Intel, and Compaq Computers. See CMS MarketWatch article below.

$600M Private Secondary Offering, Goldman Sachs.

$779.8M total equity raised. $12B publicly traded valuation at high water mark.

Internet Use Prior to Our Startup

On the global scale of Internet use at the end of 1995, there were 23,500 websites throughout the entire world available to 6 billion people, and only 7,000 of those were not “adult-themed” content, which I will refer to specifically hereafter.

I personally owned and operated one of those 7,000 websites, perfectwheels.com, (see screen capture below), which made me a 1-in-a-million person on earth who owned and operated a website at the beginning of 1996. Additionally, those same metrics numerically invert to only 1 website per 1,000,000 people.

Now, in 2025, there are over 1.2 billion websites worldwide, equating to roughly 1 website for every 7 people, a growth rate of over 51,000 times the increase in websites in just 30 years.

Anecdotally, this is the genesis for my suggestion of Merchant Transport detailed above. As was customary at this time, the industry standard to use a credit card “long distance” was either vocalized over the phone or the credit card information was sent via fax transmission.

Thus, credit card fraud was omnipresent. By Digital Island enabling secure transmission while using a browser on our private network, this issue of fraud was overcome, and the services of global eCommerce were manifested.

In the screen captures above, you can see that the website was image-centric by showing pictures of the product. These images required a very long time to download with dial-up connections, as broadband was still a pipe dream (pun intended) at this time. The industry colloquialism for this was, “Trying to use the Internet was like trying to suck a grapefruit through a straw.”

Anecdote: My website (perfectwheels.com) was a case study by Smart Valley, an association funded by Joint Venture Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley’s Institute for Regional Studies, working to coordinate people and technology with projects that enhance their quality of life. They featured Perfect Wheels as an example of how to launch an eCommerce business using Internet and Web browser technology.

The number of Internet users at the end of 1995 was 16 million worldwide; that’s only 1/5 of 1% (0.002%) of the world’s population. The geographic distribution of those users was two-thirds were located within the USA, and the rest of the world was cumulatively 1/3% of 0.002% of the population at 0.00075%.

Now, at the time of this writing in 2025, there are approximately 5.8 billion people using the Internet worldwide, or about 70% of the population, which represents a 362-fold increase in Internet user participation in just 30 years.

Clearly, with the adoption metrics of over 51,000 times more websites and 362 times more users in 30 years, the market opportunity for advancements in human communications and eCommerce was pre-existing. But prior to 1996, the globalization opportunity had not yet been manifested with infrastructure and peering investments by the incumbent and monopolistic telcos in cooperation with governments. The incumbent telcos could have done it, but they, together with governments, strategized not to.

Further detail of the legacy telcos and government depravity and corruptness is beyond the scope of this introduction, but I address the Presidential Order that initiated the change in the vulnerability of human communications and the government-sanctioned retardation of such by the telecom monopolies in Chapter 1 of my book.

For the sake of topic continuity and clarity, the following indented six paragraphs will discuss the above in condensed detail.

It is not widely known that, from 1990 when the WWW software was compiled, it remained reserved for government-only use for three years, unavailable to the public; this restriction, however, dissolved in 1993 when CERN released the software for public use, thus opening the door to our endeavors.

The Telecommunications Act of 1996

Despite this new availability, government suppression of global networking persisted in tandem with incumbent telcos until US President Bill Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996 into law. This act was the first in the world to strike down an important legal protection for telecommunications monopolies and oligopolies that solely provide telecommunication services. This made it legal for new service providers, such as Digital Island, to enter the Internet and telecommunications services sector.

Thankfully, President Clinton and Vice President Gore brought into law the opportunity to “Let anyone enter any communications business, to let any communications business compete in any market against any other.” Thus, the statute was often described as an attempt to deregulate the American broadcasting and telecommunications markets due to technological convergence.

The act was the first significant overhaul of United States telecommunications law in more than sixty years. The president signed the bill to revolutionize the way Americans get telephone and computer networking services.

This act will be memorialized as one of the most profoundly impactful acts of any president by enabling private enterprise to enter a former government-controlled and restricted field of utility. In a few short years, the act did change how globally diverse societies proliferated their ability to communicate and trade forever.

Thus, for this market timing opportunity in 1996 to present itself in the USA, it took an act of legislation at the highest levels of government. The act was actually a cancellation of the monopolies for telecommunications that had been in effect in the United States since 1934, and it ignited our entrepreneurial spirit to seize the opportunity.

Note that throughout the rest of the world there were still heavily regulated and protected monopolies existing for telecom. It is an interesting fact that every IPLC and Internet access port that I acquired around the world was technically illegal. Many of my initial inquiries to foreign Tier One telcos and ISPs went unanswered or rejected because Digital Island was not a federally licensed telecommunications carrier. In those countries, pre-existing laws prevented us from connecting to their networks.

In those cases, we only received special permissions, approvals, waivers, or amendments to the terms of service to interconnect with their networks after I traveled to their foreign offices, and made an in-person presentation of our proposed network’s opportunities. These legality and government compliance issues with the rules and regulations of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) were of paramount importance due to the financial and legal sensitivities we would have in eventually selling our stock to the public.

The intent and result of this presidential order was that in just a few short years, the above did change how globally diverse societies proliferated their ability to communicate and trade by revolutionizing how Americans get telephone and computer services and allowing new service providers, like Digital Island, to enter the Internet and telecommunications services industry.

Anecdotally, within 90 days of the law’s enactment, I started creating the global wide area network diagrams shared above, and less than nine months after the bill’s passage, I signed the Cisco Systems Web Hosting Remote Data Services contract that started our globalization of the Internet.

Thus, the aggregation and scalability of global telecom circuits had to originate and start in the USA in 1996 first, if it was going to happen at all, because elsewhere in the world there would need to be the necessary legality, financial resources, investor vision, executive leadership, and the highly skilled human collateral to enable and support it. However, prior to 1996, these resources were only available, in aggregate, in the USA.

Historical Context of the Internet

Additional Reading about the History of the Internet Protocols and the World Wide Web Information System:

1. What actually is the Internet and the Web?
2. What actually constitutes the making of the Internet and the Web?
3. Who actually made the Internet and the Web?

The development of TCP/IP and the Internet’s architecture was indeed deeply collaborative, and Kahn and Cerf’s contributions built extensively on the work of many predecessors and contemporaries, without whom their synthesis wouldn’t have been possible. The honorary title “fathers of the Internet” is often bestowed on them for their pivotal role in designing and implementing TCP/IP (1974), but it’s a simplification that doesn’t capture the full tapestry of innovations from dozens of researchers across decades.

Kahn and Cerf have consistently credited others in interviews and writings, emphasizing teamwork (e.g., Cerf often highlights Davies, Baran, and Pouzin). However, shared credit is fair, the Internet emerged from a global, multi-disciplinary effort, not a duo’s isolated genius.

To illustrate, here’s a table of key figures whose technologies and ideas were essential to TCP/IP’s success (beyond those previously discussed like Davies, Baran, and Pouzin):

There are many more (e.g., Steve Crocker for RFC process, Gerard Le Lann for Cyclades details). Kahn conceived open-architecture networking at DARPA, and Cerf co-developed TCP/IP, but they integrated these prior technologies, packet switching from Davies/Baran, datagrams from Pouzin, into a cohesive system. The “fathers” label, from awards like the Turing Prize (2004), recognizes their synthesis and leadership in transitioning from ARPANET to a multi-network Internet, but it’s symbolic.

If viewing it through the lens of “building” the global network (e.g., via IPLCs), their role is more “architectural enablers” than sole creators.

The following illustrative code samples for TCP/IP and WWW/HTTP protocols, demonstrating their technical underpinnings.

TCP/IP Code sample

WWW/HTTP Code sample

For the TCP/IP and WWW/HTTP protocols to function, there are many other dependencies on physical equipment and software applications, each representing a different step of the transmission chain.

When we transfer information from one device to another, it travels figuratively through the seven layers of the OSI model. First, data travels down through seven layers from the sender’s end, and then it climbs back seven layers on the receiver’s end.

As you can see illustrated below, TCP/IP and WWW/HTTP software protocols are a small part of what is required for collaborative transmissions to perform from one person to another, or across the globe, in what became synonymous and colloquially called the Internet and Web.

For a collaborative transmission, data flows through the OSI model in a step-by-step process:

• Application Layer: Applications create the data. WWW/HTTP participates here
• Presentation Layer: Data is formatted and encrypted.
• Session Layer: Connections are established and managed.
• Transport Layer: Data is broken into segments for reliable delivery. TCP participates here
• Network Layer: Segments are packaged into packets and routed.
• Data Link Layer: Packets are framed and sent to the next device.
• Physical Layer: Frames are converted into bits and transmitted physically.

Clearly, a minority portion of the software protocols running across a physical network and displayed in a desktop browser application neither independently nor physically constitute the Internet or Web.

Furthermore, the actual realization of the Internet as a functioning global network is a totally separate endeavor, costing billions of dollars in capital investment and requiring many different and entirely distinct areas of physical network, software contributions, infrastructure specialization, and vast amounts of expert human collateral.

The following diagram charts the proliferation of websites from 1991 to 2019. The graph clearly shows that the Internet got its legs after we started the private investment to globalize worldwide internetworking in 1996 and subsequently went public on the NASDAQ in 1999, raising additional capital to increase footprint, capacity, and redundancy.

As previously shared above, the TCP/IP protocols were developed in 1974 and the WWW information system in 1990, but those software stack authorships required physical plant to be funded, installed, sold to customers, and proliferated.

The cause and effect are all quite simple: we enabled the globalization of Internet connectivity and sharing around the world, and people and businesses alike rushed to use it. Clearly, the then pent-up demand was preexisting, as evidenced by the statistics.

Subsequently, the exponential growth of the global participation of Internet technologies and infrastructure validated our business plan and our role in leadership as the first to market worldwide physical network installations, which led to the realization of Internet globalization and eCommerce.

Note the website traction “hockey stick” of market adoption that takes off three years after we started hosting and broadcasting our 881 customers’ content and services, facilitated by our internetworking 95% of the world’s ISPs, and thus 95% of the world’s Internet-accessible population together by the year 2000.

Keep in mind that websites are a very recent innovation and a communications phenomenon. The Mosaic Web browser, the first to display images in line with text instead of in separate windows, deserves recognition for this proliferation.

Two programmers, Marc Andreessen (student) and Eric Bina (staff member), working at NCSA, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, developed the browser, which saw its first public release in 1993. The browser’s indispensable role in popularizing the use of the general Internet through the integration of multimedia is impossible to quantify.

With the above in mind, prior to 1996, there wasn’t a business case for regional ISPs to subsidize the investment of infrastructure from the monopoly telcos and interconnect with the rest of the world’s ISPs. This means, from a user perspective, that not everyone could see my website because their ISP wasn’t connected to my ISP.

Therefore, having a website and an ISP hosting and broadcasting your content using WWW code did not mean your website was worldwide, and in reality it was quite the contrary.

Subsequently, the realization of the Internet protocol suite and the World Wide Web information system, when combined as originally intended with the many facets of the physical global network infrastructure, triggered the explosive exponential growth of the Internet and Web, thereby fundamentally and profoundly revising our modern societies and civilization.

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Contact and Book Details

How to contact Mr. Nichols

To contact Mr. Nichols: If you would like to contact me for a discussion about a speaking invitation for your school or institution, an educational series for students or employees, or something else, you can text or call 1-775-600-3400, or use this email: [email protected]

My book, How I Made the Web World Wide, is now available on Amazon. Click here to go to my Amazon page.

My daughters initially encouraged me to write this book, suggesting that I use it to teach university-level business students about technology start-ups and entrepreneurialism, including the principles and concepts of potential Wall Street investments through initial public offerings (IPOs).

If you found the above to be of interest, please consider reading the book, as there is much more information about the adventure of creating the enterprise. The book spans less than 80 pages, with approximately 20 of those pages dedicated to images.

My aim was to create a narrative that incorporated various sources such as contracts, press releases, photos, email communications, diagrams, and more, using the written prose to contextualize the images. For time budgeting, I estimate it will take most people about two hours to read.

I tried to employ a writing style for non-industry people to make the story interesting and the readability accessible to everyone, but there is enough information to keep those who are in the industry captivated and informed.

From the Epilogue:

So much happened so fast, impacting so many people, with so many cultural and economic influences, and with so many resulting aftereffects. It is my hope that everyone appreciates the hard work by all the amazing people who chose to contribute to Internet-centric telecommunications for the collective benefit of us all, as it was an incredibly difficult, expensive, and unsecured endeavor with extraordinarily challenging goals.

The World’s commerce, trade, finance, distribution, education, human communications, and the Internet were measurably different before and after the Digital Island team.

“One of these days, this Internet thing is really going to catch on.”

Mark Nichols, 1994