Mark Nichols – Internet Globalization & eCommerce Pioneer

In my book, How I Made the Web World Wide, I chronicle my journey as the co-founder of Digital Island in 1996. This pioneering Internet infrastructure company transformed the Internet from a collection of fragmented, regional ISPs into the world’s first unified Tier-0 global online platform. By creating the first global network of networks, we made the Internet a functional, worldwide commercial system that enabled the most transformative event in human history: the globalization of eCommerce.

In rapid succession, we connected the world’s major ISPs and enabled approximately 95 percent of Internet users worldwide to communicate on a single, uninterrupted network with round-trip latency of under one-third of a second. For the first time, this performance was delivered globally and securely, including end-to-end SSL connections to and from anywhere in the world.

Most noticeably, as our network came online in each major market, we turned the Internet from a dial-up dumpster fire into a seamless, worldwide communications portal, shopping mall, and cash register. That shift did not merely change what people did online. It changed how humanity functioned: trade, finance, communication, education, media, and opportunity began converging into a single, synchronized global platform.

As a complement to the visionaries, architects, designers, and coders whose work laid the foundation of internetworking, our contribution circled the square between protocol and practice. Protocols describe how data moves. The Digital Island network of networks was the first to enable civilization to use the Internet as intended.

Digital Island did not invent the Internet’s protocols. It was the first entity to operationalize them as a true global network of networks. In that sense, Digital Island marks the moment the Internet crossed from invention into industrialization and became a functioning worldwide system.

The Funding

Starting with a bold vision, between 1996 and 1999 our team raised $779 million to build a global telecommunications network of networks that reshaped worldwide connectivity. Our shareholders, investors, and customers included ComVentures, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, Chase Capital, Cisco Systems, Stanford University, AOL, Sun Microsystems (5,000 dedicated servers), Visa, MasterCard, Charles Schwab, and E*TRADE.

The market validated this platform not only through network adoption, but through capital and strategic partnership. In addition to our earlier venture rounds, in June of 2000, Digital Island completed a $45 million private equity investment led by Microsoft, Intel, and Compaq (8,000 dedicated servers), a four-way validation signal that the world’s largest software, semiconductor, and computer companies recognized Digital Island, the CDN operator, as the global Internet operations layer that would define the next era.

At the time, deploying thousands of dedicated servers worldwide required building and operating power plants, logistics systems, and physical facilities at a scale comparable to a multinational industrial manufacturer, not a software startup. These were not passive participants in history, but the engine of it, supplying the capital, infrastructure, and institutional trust required to globalize the Internet and ignite a worldwide financial revolution.

This was the moment the Internet moved from strategy and proof of concept into industrialization, becoming the platform that enabled the most transformative event in human history.

I thank everyone who took part in making this possible. This outcome was only possible because of the individuals and institutions willing to accept extraordinary technical, financial, and personal risks.

The Vision and Solution

Envision 1996, and consider the illustration below, where the blue lines represent the service areas of regional Internet providers (e.g., France Telecom, Japan Telecom, Singapore Telecom, Deutsche Telekom), and the red lines depict the oceanic and terrestrial fiber-optic IPLCs that I contracted for and put into service, linking every major metro with an Internet presence around the world.

With the above vision, plan, and funding in place, I acquired the infrastructure needed to create the first IP-based global WAN using IPLCs (International Private Line Circuits), with QoS guarantees, thus enabling the globalization of the Internet, the Web, and eCommerce.

This moment marked a turning point in human history. For the first time, people could exchange money securely and instantly across borders, without physical presence and without barriers. It transformed humanity almost overnight from a collection of independent financial civilizations into a single, synchronized, self-aware economic species. The world economy shifted with the speed of a DNS update.

Digital Island’s network reached unprecedented speed and scale, ultimately affecting billions of people at once. It democratized opportunity and wealth creation more broadly and more rapidly than any event that came before it. It unified all previous technological and economic revolutions into a single, instantaneous, planetary economic organism.

Commerce, trade, finance, distribution, education, communication, and every Internet-based application were measurably, globally, and irreversibly different after the Digital Island network went live.

This is the story of How I Made the Web World Wide.

The Internet was not created by one person or one institution. It was built by hundreds of contributors across many decades. The people listed in Who Made the Internet provided the foundations, the software, the protocols, the theories, and the early networks. They produced the magic that made global connectivity imaginable.

My role was different than the protocol designers and network equipment creators. I contributed to creating the business case, securing landmark customers, attracting venture capital, and building our Tier-0 global infrastructure that allowed their work to function at worldwide scale. The engineers and scientists created the possibility. I built the platform that made that possibility a six-continent reality. That is how the Internet became a global utility.

In my role, I spearheaded the global eCommerce business initiative, which included developing the financial pro forma. This required projecting key metrics such as revenue and expenses, forecasting anticipated financial performance and growth to optimize 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 enabled us to secure our seed capital from Cliff Higgerson formerly at ComVentures and later at Walden International.

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 during my travels to Beijing while negotiating 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 world’s largest media streaming network, built in partnership with Microsoft, Intel, and Compaq.
5. The first global Content Delivery Network (CDN), also known as the Local Content Manager (two years before Akamai was founded in 1998).
6. The first Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) implementation for on-demand bandwidth allocation over the Internet, using the Reservation Resource Protocol (RSVP).
7. In 1996, when I negotiated and signed the service contract with Cisco Systems to host Cisco.com, Cisco ranked as the 587th largest company in the United States. Three years later, they became the most valuable company in the world while relying on our network to scale their growth.
8. The award and recognition as the world’s first Cisco Powered Network, which became the global internetworking industry benchmark.
9. The Internet access platform used by Google’s founders in 1998 to build the first repository of search results while they were graduate students at Stanford University (google.stanford.edu), supported by our role as Stanford’s ISP beginning in Q1 1997.
10. TraceWare, a patented algorithm developed with Stanford University’s HighWire Press. This technology uses real-time data processing to automate regulatory compliance for global media, addressing both regional and localized requirements.

The Genesis Network Diagram

In June 1996, I sketched the diagram below as the first blueprint for a network designed to globalize the Internet. It maps the planned Points of Presence (PoPs) for an Internet-centric global wide-area network spanning Asia-Pacific, the Americas, Western Europe, plus additional placeholder PoPs representing the rest of the world (RoW).

Ron’s original concept was a “Digital Publisher Service in the Pacific Rim.” I pushed it from a PacRim-first idea to a global build after pointing out a simple reality: the same underlying frame relay approach cost roughly the same whether we connected Tokyo or Paris. If we were going to do it at all, we should do it worldwide and support localization from day one, translating English-language sites into French, German, Spanish, and more. Ron agreed, and we shifted from a regional plan to a global enterprise.

Four months later, the story changed again. What began as a translation and digital publishing concept became a plan to enable global eCommerce. To do that, we moved beyond frame relay and committed to International Private Line Circuits, which let us deliver guaranteed latency, reliability, and Quality of Service. I explain the technical and business reasons for that pivot below.

This hand-drawn rendering predates our company’s business license application by four months. I created it while I was still employed at Sprint, about 60 days before I joined Ron and Sanne, his wife, to launch the startup.

In the second quarter of 1996, as we began positioning our planned services, only about 75,000 commercially viable websites existed worldwide (excluding adult-themed sites), supporting basic applications such as email, information sharing, and early commerce. Lacking the investment required to achieve a true global physical presence, the Internet itself was essentially waiting for the activation of our network in the final week of December 1996.

To enable the vast array of existing and emerging Internet technologies, and to anticipate the exponential growth that would follow, we had to acquire an extensive set of distinct infrastructure elements, including:

• Global Physical Presence:
  • Data centers and Points of Presence (PoPs) in every key metropolitan area.
  • Power, cooling, and facility redundancies (e.g., HVAC systems, backup power).
• Networking & Interconnection:
  • Physical switching and routing equipment,
  • Fiber-optic cables and backbone connections.
  • Dedicated peering ports with every Tier 1 ISP (a strategic alternative to public IXPs/NAPs).
• Hosting & Hardware:
  • Server infrastructure for hosting, content mirroring, and CDN services.
• Software & Security:
  • Extensive software systems and data collection structures,
  • DNS infrastructure,
  • Security appliances and licensing.
• Commercial & Financial:
  • Legal viability,
  • Negotiation and maintenance of 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.

In July 1996, I drafted the network diagram shown below on my Mac IIcx using Aldus PageMaker 4.0, which I had purchased in 1990. In that illustration, I identified the need to move our proposed network hub from Hawaii to California. Hawaii sat at the end of an oceanic telecom spur dependent on California and lacked the fiber-optic access, capacity, latency, and route diversity required for our mission. After verifying these limitations, I redirected the plan to the Stanford University data center, which became the logical hub as Stanford became our second customer. You can see the press release a few pages down.

I also realized that storing mission-critical servers on an island with six active volcanoes within a 100-mile radius was not exactly a marketing advantage.

The Hawaii Ruse

Ron’s early pitch claimed Hawaii was the logical hub because it supposedly had direct access to transpacific fiber. “The fiber comes out of the ground in Honolulu.” In June 1996, while I was still employed at Sprint, Sprint engineering confirmed the opposite. Hawaii is a spur, not a gateway. Routing through Hawaii causes tromboning. Traffic detours to the mainland and then back to Asia. Latency goes up. Complexity goes up. Failure points multiply. It is a worse design, not a better one.

This diagrams below, note the second one where I have encircled Hawaii in white, the images depict bidirectional links westward to Asia, this is 100% totally fabricated. The “Hawaii as the gateway to Asia” narrative promoted by Ron and the leadership team was marketing fiction. It did not work that way then. It does not work that way now. There was never a technical reason for it. It was a story that made Ron sound like he found a *genius* shortcut to Asia.

Subsea systems are not interchangeable plug in ports. They are engineered routes between defined endpoints. They are provisioned, contracted, and physically constrained by landing stations and controlled access. You do not “tap Hawaii” and magically redirect Asia. The topology makes Hawaii an endpoint, not a control point.

In June of 1996, I proved the claim was invalid. The claim did not stop. It kept showing up in summaries, diagrams, and press. That was the problem. Not confusion. Not a harmless simplification. It was repetition after correction. It survived because it flattered the person selling it.

And that is where I became “the issue.” Not because I broke the plan. Because I would not endorse a lie. The Hawaii pitch was a fairy tale packaged as strategic advantage. After it was corrected, repeating it was reckless because it drifted into investor facing representation. You do not get to invent physical topology to sound smart. The SEC is not a stage for self authored legends.

Subsea systems are not interchangeable plug-in ports that a local market can tap and redirect. They are engineered, provisioned, and contractually assigned as hard-wired routes between defined endpoints, with controlled landing stations and controlled access. The topology makes Hawaii an endpoint, not a control point. Continuing to push that claim in executive summaries and public materials after it was corrected was reckless. Investor-facing representations are supposed to be truthful. The SEC is not in the business of approving fairy tales.

I corrected the premise in June 1996 and moved the hub plan to California, where carrier demarcations and interconnection points actually exist. That became the direction we executed. Hawaii, installed in December 1996, was positioned as a backup path. Our first California-based data center went live on the Stanford University campus in January 1997.

Yet the Hawaii gateway narrative stayed in executive summaries, diagrams, and marketing long after we already knew it was false. That is the issue. It was not a mistake that got fixed. It was “Ron’s Story” and it was a story that got kept.

Founding timeline, equity representations, stolen valor, and the paper trail

This section exists to correct a public narrative that erased my role and reassigned foundational credit elsewhere. When early representations, later SEC filings, and the “official” founding story do not match, that is not harmless storytelling. That is stolen valor.

On August 5, 1996, I joined Ron and Sanne Higgins to build what became Digital Island. From the start, I was doing the work of building an operating company, before there was real corporate machinery to match the representations being made. [1]

At that time, there was no practical infrastructure in place for a board governed option plan, issued equity, or the controls that normally constrain what a CEO can promise. Hawaii business registration for Digital Island was not filed until the following month. [2]

During the earliest employment contract negotiations, months before I negotiated and signed the Cisco services agreement that made the company financeable, I was told I would receive 3 percent of the company. The representation was an early cap table on the order of 2.5 to 3.0 million shares, with my stake described as about 100,000 shares, roughly 3 percent by that math. I was also told the CEO stake would be 6 percent. [1]

The August 5, 1996 offer letter shows the nature of those representations in writing. It references an employee incentive stock option plan to be implemented “this year,” recommends an option grant of 100,000 shares for my role, and states that August compensation would be paid as stock equivalent value, priced by the company’s “next selling share price.” [1]

That gap matters because it creates a window where equity promises and origin claims can be made without the governance and documentation that makes them accountable. Once the SEC narrative exists, it becomes the default “official” history. That is how stolen valor gets laundered into the public record.

Years later, the company filed its Form S-1 (April 26, 1999). In that filing, percentage ownership is presented against 27,870,736 shares outstanding (as converted) as of March 31, 1999. The CEO is shown at 2,075,000 shares (7.4%). The CTO is shown at 195,267 shares and the CFO at 83,000 shares, each shown as less than 1 percent ownership.

My stake, in contrast, ended up on the order of one one-thousandth of the company, not 3 percent. I was also omitted from the founding narrative as presented in the S-1. The same week the S-1 was filed, I was terminated, and the company kept my unvested equity, including unvested portions tied to my founder level tranche and years of performance bonuses.

This is not just dilution. It is a rewrite of who held founder level equity and who gets founder level credit.

The pattern matters. Multiple early executives show sub 1 percent positions on paper while one cofounder retains a materially larger stake. I cannot speak to what anyone was promised privately. I can speak to the public outcome. When recruiting representations and SEC era capitalization reality diverge, and the divergence concentrates both ownership and credit, that is a systemic reset, not a one off mistake.

The S-1 also contains a second narrative move that matters for history. It states the company did not begin offering its Global IP Applications Network services until January 1997, and that prior activities were unrelated to current operations. If your documentation shows operating reality and material customer work in 1996, that statement becomes part of the same story arc: paper framing that minimizes the 1996 build period and the people who made it real.

What made the company real was execution, not paperwork. In November 1996, I negotiated and signed the Cisco services agreement. That contract was the cornerstone that made the company financeable. [3] Funding followed the work.

Paper trail
[1] Employment offer letter (Aug 5, 1996): https://marknichols.com/employment-agreement-8-5-1996/
[2] Hawaii business registration filing (Sep 6, 1996): https://marknichols.com/business-registration-9-6-1996/
[3] Cisco services agreement (Nov 1996): https://marknichols.com/cisco/
[4] Digital Island Form S-1 (filed Apr 26, 1999): https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1084329/0001012870-99-001268.txt

Note to peers: The frame-relay network was replaced with clear-channel circuits (International Private Line Circuits, or IPLCs) after our proof of concept in Q4 1996. The inherent limitation of frame relay is that it offers no Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees for latency or security. In mid-September 1996, we made the decision to change our mission and pursue the globalization of eCommerce through secure transactional services, what I termed Merchant Transport. There is more detail on this several paragraphs below.

The Cisco Contract: Our Franchise Document and Meal Ticket

On November 7, 1996, I secured a landmark agreement to host Cisco.com, a defining milestone for our 60-day-old, three-person startup that set the trajectory for Digital Island’s global rise.

Working closely with Cisco’s Lance Perry (VP of IT) and Herve Goguely (Senior Director of Global Service Management), we aligned product vision with execution. Together, we shaped the industry’s first commercial hosting service. I productized the offering, built the financial model, defined measurable QoS standards, and negotiated the legal terms, culminating in the signing at Cisco’s headquarters.

This contract, the first real proof-of-concept for Digital Island’s vision, unlocked $300,000 in seed funding and catalyzed the $779 million in institutional investment that followed. It enabled the rapid recruitment of the engineering talent required to build our global infrastructure, procure and deploy hardware at scale, and create the world’s first seamless, Tier 0, high-performance Internet backbone.

Historical Firsts Achieved by This Agreement

Productization:
The first contract in history to formally productize global Internet hosting as a scalable commercial service.

Accountability:
The first agreement to define enforceable Quality of Service (QoS) metrics and global Service Level Agreements (SLAs), binding a commercial entity to worldwide Internet performance standards.

Commercial Foundation:
The first executed agreement to transition the Internet from the academic/government research era into global commercial reality, architected, priced, negotiated, and executed by Mark Nichols.

This contract marks the moment the Internet received the spark that made it operational, accountable, and commercially trustworthy on a global scale.

Without this singular executed agreement, the financial validation, technical legitimacy, and operational foundation required for Digital Island, and thus for the immediate globalization of the Internet and eCommerce, would not have existed anywhere outside of Fairyland.

At the start of 1996, Cisco ranked #587 in the U.S. Fortune 1000 by revenue. Three years later, in 1999, Cisco became the most valuable company in the world. Founded in 1984, Cisco reached this historic milestone, the first time an Internet company had ever become the #1 most valuable company in both the United States and worldwide, just 15 years after its startup. During this period, we served as Cisco’s web hosting contractor and ISP, providing the global scalability that supported their rise.

As noted in the renderings above, to support our revised mission for eCommerce, we pivoted in Q1 1997 by replacing the frame-relay ports in Hawaii with new IPLCs demarcated to the Stanford University data center.

It is important to note that as of September 6, 1996, the business was originally conceived as a Pacific Rim, centric hosting and translation services company focused on American content written in English and translated into Japanese, Mandarin, Cantonese,  and Korean 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 the municipal filing. See the filing with the Hawaii Department of Commerce below.

For the originally conceived business model, frame relay was preferred because of its lower cost and shared customer utility of line capacity. Frame is managed by the carrier, not the customer, and its inherent design allows for burstable bandwidth.

Thus, for the digital publishing services company Digital Island initially aspired to become, frame relay was the fastest and least expensive path to market, offered immediate scalability, and required no in-house network engineering or management team. However, this plan proved 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, budget, and operational complexity required to build and manage our own network, driven by an intensified goal: enabling Merchant Transport and the effective globalization of eCommerce.

The image below is an email from Sanne, Ron’s wife and our Director of Communications, sent to me on September 18, 1996, just twelve 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 concept to incorporate into her marketing materials, which I had previously shared with Ron during a dinner conversation a few nights earlier.

The Caterpillar to Butterfly Transformation

How Did the Caterpillar Become a Butterfly?

Now visualize the following:

1. Remove the red lines, and you see the “Internet caterpillar” of 1996, an era before any global network existed to provide seamless, end-to-end Internet access across all major metros and Internet-served regions of the world.

Imagine an “Internet” where Rostelecom in Russia was not connected to Embratel in Brazil; Malaysia Telecom was not connected to Telefónica 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 operated on a single 64-kilobit intranet (64 Kb, the capacity of one telephone line) shared among 300 universities, with a single 64 Kb link to Sprint.

User adoption timing was critical. The economies of scale required for globalization were not yet financially viable, because no model existed that could generate shareholder returns on such a massive, worldwide networking endeavor.

Without seamless global connectivity, the Internet Protocol suite. including the software enabling the World Wide Web, could not support true internetworking beyond local hosts, regional footprints, or limited peering relationships.

Consequently, ISPs and enterprises using TCP/IP/WWW software applied it almost exclusively within their own corporate or regional networks, essentially intranets.

As a result, the potential value of the Internet and WWW software protocols remained unrealized; with only regional or private implementations, the protocols functioned merely as the “Internet” and “World Wide Web” in name only.

Global utilization was technically possible using these software protocols, but as of early 1996, no one had implemented TCP/IP/WWW on a single, end-to-end, autonomous global network.

In 1996, when I began building this network, ISPs were territorially focused and operated almost entirely within their own regional infrastructures. For example, France Telecom and Japan Telecom primarily served French and Japanese businesses and consumers, respectively. Their services provided Internet access only within their own spheres of influence, with limited peering relationships. This physically constrained their network footprints and electronically restricted their customers’ ability to access content beyond their regional intranets.

You could host a website or web-centric application anywhere in the world, but that did not mean everyone in the world could access or use it. By design, regional ISPs did not guarantee access to content outside their own networks, especially content hosted in other countries or on other continents. Prior to our network rollout, Quality of Service (QoS) for the Internet did not exist; we introduced the first guaranteed 300-millisecond (three-tenths of a second) round-trip performance standard to anywhere in the world, at any time. This QoS enforcement is what enabled us to globalize eCommerce.

2. Now put the red lines back in, and you see the “Internet butterfly”, the infrastructure metamorphosis of globalization that we initiated in 1996. Remember, the butterfly is co-dependent on the caterpillar stage. The global private lines I acquired spanned the world and created the first global ISP backbone, interconnecting all major regional ISPs within each metro. This network metamorphosis is what finally realized the full capability of the Internet software protocol suite.

By January 1999, the Digital Island network had connected all major ISPs worldwide that were 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, and across major U.S. metros such as Miami, New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, Virginia, Seattle, Honolulu, Palo Alto, and Santa Clara.

From a historical perspective, the solutions described above represented an entirely new market opportunity because global network services like ours did not exist prior to our startup. As a result, we were able to contract, host, and broadcast the websites of 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, E*TRADE, Charles Schwab, Novell, National Semiconductor, MasterCard, Sun Microsystems, Sandpiper Networks, NetGravity, Canon, AristaSoft, Universal Music Group, ABN AMRO, UBS Warburg, Digital River, The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, EBSCO Publishing, Fox Broadcasting, ZDNet, Reuters, Kenneth Cole, MSNBC, Major League Baseball, Time Warner–Road Runner, AOL, CNBC, JPMorgan Chase, Sony, Bloomberg, and more than 850 others.

Notably, with 881 customers acquired in four years, and roughly 220 business days per year, our customer acquisition rate averaged one new customer every business day for four consecutive years.

With the above in mind, accomplishing our goals required connecting all Tier 1 ISPs around the world that were actively providing Internet services. By interconnecting every Tier 1 telecom ISP globally, we effectively became the world’s first “Tier 0” carrier/ISP. Although “Tier 0” is not a traditional industry term, it is the most accurate description of our role in organizing and unifying the legacy Tier 1 incumbents worldwide.

Therefore, our business statement and executive summary positioned us as the network services tier above all existing providers. This framework became the foundation for acquiring our customers, investors, service providers, and the highly specialized human capital required to make it all materialize.

We believed that you can dream as boldly as you want, write as much protocol software as needed, and raise as much capital as possible, but ultimately, success depends on highly qualified and dedicated individuals choosing to join your company, doing the work that transforms emergent technology into a service, and providing the ongoing, scalable support required to sustain it.

It was the people who created the networking inventions, and those who made the investments, performed the installations, and committed their careers, who sparked the revolution in information sharing and fundamentally changed 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 provides a brief overview of how the financial and commercial sectors became involved in our entrepreneurial journey, a journey that began with building the business case, designing the network architecture, acquiring customers, recruiting specialized human capital, and securing $779 million in speculative venture capital investment.

Beginning in 1996, we began making the investments required to fully realize the potential of the software protocol stacks, protocols conceived and written twenty-two years earlier for TCP/IP and six years earlier for the World Wide Web, all originally intended for worldwide implementation but never previously deployed at global scale.

Below is our company’s first press release, issued in January 1997, announcing both the services contract to host the Cisco Systems website and the debut of our “NEW GLOBAL NETWORK.”

Stanford University: Our Customer, Our Partner in Patented Innovations, and Our First Silicon Valley Data Center Location

We acquired Stanford University as our second customer, supporting the enablement and distribution of their ePublication and eLearning services. Prior to this press release, I had already initiated our first California network PoP on the Stanford campus in January 1997.

Stanford was one of the first two nodes of the Internet, along with UCLA, in 1969, and by 1997, we were hosting and broadcasting their website on our global network. The significance of this cannot be overstated: Stanford and Cisco were our first two clients, demonstrating the magnitude of the value proposition of our global infrastructure. Our services also provided Stanford with the Internet platform that Google’s founders used in 1998 for upstream ISP connectivity to build the first repository of Google search results while they were graduate students (google.stanford.edu).

With Cisco and Stanford on board, the technology and financial communities began to take very serious notice.

E*Trade Invests After Becoming a Customer

The press release below details our customer acquisition of E*TRADE, their subsequent investment, and their board involvement. Prior to this, Visa had been on-network since 1997, and only a few months later we brought Charles Schwab and MasterCard online. Seamless, global eCommerce with Visa, MasterCard, Charles Schwab, and E*TRADE became simultaneously available across six continents, for the first time in every major metro worldwide, and only on our network.

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

Provenance of Startup Servers and Early Business Development Travels

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

Note that the servers were shipped to my residence in Alamo, California, because I was still working from home until we received our $3.5 million Series A investment in February. With that funding, I then contracted for 14,000 square feet of office space in San Francisco’s Embarcadero to support our first 100 employees.

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The following images are a sampling of pages from my passport, documenting the business development travel required to acquire the infrastructure needed to build our global network.

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

At that time, China accounted for 18% of the world’s population yet had only a single telephone line dedicated to Internet access and intranet networking, one 64 Kb circuit 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 required payment for the circuit and port fees three months in advance.

A brief account of our peering with China can be found at: https://marknichols.com/china/

 

 

 

 

 

 

The following press releases detail the data centers I acquired around the world to support the infrastructure required to build our global network and enable 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 noted earlier, Internet protocols are not the physical Internet or the Web. To realize the potential of these software creations, someone must raise the capital required to fund the underlying network and telecommunications infrastructure. The following outlines what Digital Island’s finance team accomplished to fund the acquisition of the components that made our global network possible:

• $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

• $45M Private Equity Investment: Microsoft, Intel, and Compaq

• $600M Private Secondary Offering: Goldman Sachs

Total equity raised: $779.8 million
Peak public valuation: $12 billion

 

Internet Use Prior to Our Startup

At the end of 1995, there were only 23,500 websites available to a global population of 6 billion people, and just 7,000 of those sites were non-adult-themed.

I personally owned and operated one of those 7,000 websites, perfectwheels.com (see screen capture below), which made me literally a one-in-a-million individual on Earth operating a website at the beginning of 1996. Numerically, the ratio was one website per one million people.

Today, in 2025, there are more than 1.2 billion websites worldwide, roughly one website for every seven people, representing a more than 51,000-fold increase in just 30 years.

Anecdotally, this environment was the genesis of my Merchant Transport concept described earlier. At the time, the industry standard for using a credit card “long distance” was either to read the number aloud over the phone or to transmit it via fax.

As a result, credit card fraud was omnipresent. By enabling secure, browser-based transmission over our private network, Digital Island eliminated this vulnerability and made global eCommerce viable for the first time.

As shown in the screen captures above, the website was image-centric, displaying product photos that took a long time to download over dial-up connections. Broadband was still a distant dream. The industry’s running joke captured the experience perfectly: using the Internet was like trying to suck a grapefruit through a straw.

Anecdote: PerfectWheels.com was selected as a case study by Smart Valley, an association funded by Joint Venture Silicon Valley and Silicon Valley’s Institute for Regional Studies, focused on coordinating people and technology to improve quality of life. They featured Perfect Wheels as an example of how to launch an eCommerce business using Internet and Web browser technology.

At the end of 1995, there were only 16 million Internet users worldwide, just 0.2% of the global population. Two-thirds of those users were in the United States; the remaining one-third represented only 0.00075% of the world’s population.

Today, in 2025, approximately 5.8 billion people use the Internet worldwide, about 70% of the global population. This represents a 362-fold increase in user participation in just 30 years.

Clearly, with more than 51,000 times more websites and 362 times more users over three decades, the market demand for advancements in human communication and eCommerce was already present. But prior to 1996, the opportunity for true globalization had not materialized because incumbent, monopolistic telcos, often in cooperation with governments, had not made the required infrastructure or peering investments. They could have done it, but they strategically chose not to.

A deeper exploration of legacy telco behavior and government-sanctioned obstruction is beyond the scope of this introduction, but I address the Presidential Order that ultimately changed the trajectory of global communications, and ended decades of monopoly-driven stagnation, in Chapter 1 of my book.

For clarity and continuity, the following paragraphs summarize these dynamics in condensed form.

It is not widely known that when the WWW software was first compiled in 1990, it remained restricted to government-only use for three years. That restriction finally ended in 1993 when CERN released the software for public use, opening the door to the endeavors that would follow.

The Telecommunications Act of 1996

Despite the newfound public availability of the WWW, government suppression of global networking continued in alignment with incumbent telcos until President Bill Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996 into law. This act was the first in the world to remove a critical legal protection for telecommunications monopolies and oligopolies, making it possible for new service providers, such as Digital Island, to legally enter the Internet and telecommunications markets.

President Clinton and Vice President Gore enacted the principle to “let anyone enter any communications business, and let any communications business compete in any market against any other.” The statute was widely described as an effort to deregulate American broadcasting and telecommunications markets in response to accelerating technological convergence.

Improved:

The act represented the first major overhaul of U.S. telecommunications law in more than sixty years. The president signed it to fundamentally transform how Americans accessed telephone and computer networking services.

This act stands as one of the most profoundly impactful actions of any president, as it enabled private enterprises to enter a sector that had long been government-controlled and heavily restricted. Within just a few years, it fundamentally changed how globally diverse societies communicated and traded, permanently reshaping the world.

Thus, for this market-opening opportunity to emerge in 1996, it required legislation at the highest levels of government. The act effectively dismantled telecommunications monopolies that had existed since 1934, and it ignited our entrepreneurial drive to seize the moment.

It is important to note that, throughout most of the world, telecommunications monopolies remained heavily regulated and protected. As a result, every IPLC and Internet access port I acquired internationally was technically illegal under those countries’ legacy laws. Many of my initial inquiries to foreign Tier 1 telcos and ISPs went unanswered or were outright rejected because Digital Island was not a federally licensed telecommunications carrier. In those jurisdictions, existing regulations forbade us from connecting to their networks.

In those cases, we were granted special permissions, approvals, waivers, or amended terms of service only after I traveled to their offices abroad and personally presented the opportunities our network offered. These legal and regulatory issues, especially with respect to SEC compliance, were paramount, given the financial and legal sensitivities involved in eventually taking our company public.

The intent, and the outcome, of this presidential action was that, within just a few years, it transformed how globally diverse societies communicated and traded. By revolutionizing how Americans accessed telephone and computer services, it opened the door for new service providers like Digital Island to enter the Internet and telecommunications industry.

Anecdotally, within 90 days of the law’s enactment, I began creating the global wide-area network diagrams shown above. Less than nine months after the bill’s passage, I signed the Cisco Systems Web Hosting Remote Data Services contract—the agreement that initiated our globalization of the Internet.

Thus, the aggregation and scaling of global telecom circuits had to begin in the United States in 1996, because nowhere else in the world did the combination of legal authority, financial resources, investor vision, executive leadership, and specialized human capital exist in sufficient concentration to make it possible. Prior to 1996, only the U.S. possessed these elements in aggregate.

Historical Context of the Internet & Web

(https://whomadetheinternet.com)

Simply put, the Internet is a network of networks. The term “internetworking” describes how independent networks communicate with one another to form a larger system. Understanding this distinction is essential to understanding what the Internet is, how it was made, and who made it.

For additional background on the history of the Internet Protocol Suite and the World Wide Web information system, consider the following foundational questions:

• What actually is the Internet and the Web?
• What actually constitutes the making of the Internet and the Web?
• Who actually made the Internet and the Web?

Beyond the “Fathers of the Internet” Label

The development of TCP/IP and the Internet’s core protocol architecture was inherently collaborative. Robert Kahn and Vint Cerf made pivotal and historically important contributions, but their work was built upon foundations established by many predecessors and contemporaries across multiple countries, institutions, and decades. Without those prior innovations, TCP/IP could not have existed.

The honorary label “Fathers of the Internet” is commonly applied to Kahn and Cerf for their leadership beginning in 1974. While the designation recognizes their role in synthesis and coordination, it oversimplifies a far broader body of work. The Internet did not emerge from a single invention, a single paper, or a single pair of individuals. It emerged through layered discovery, parallel research, iterative refinement, and global validation.

Kahn and Cerf themselves have repeatedly acknowledged this reality. In interviews, technical papers, and public statements, they have emphasized that the Internet was a team achievement. Cerf has explicitly credited Donald Davies, Paul Baran, and Louis Pouzin as foundational influences. Shared credit is not a courtesy. It is a matter of historical accuracy.

Packet switching, decentralized routing, open architectures, and datagram-based communication were not invented in isolation. These ideas emerged independently and concurrently across multiple research programs. TCP/IP was not a singular invention. It was a synthesis.

To illustrate the breadth of this collaboration, the following contributors represent a non-exhaustive but structurally essential group whose work directly enabled TCP/IP and internetworking to exist at all.

Structurally Essential Contributors to TCP/IP and Internetworking

Paul Baran
Developed distributed packet-switched network architectures emphasizing redundancy and survivability. Established core concepts of decentralized routing and fault tolerance.

Donald Davies
Coined the term “packet switching” and independently developed practical packet network designs at the UK National Physical Laboratory. Directly influenced ARPANET and Internet architecture.

Leonard Kleinrock
Developed the mathematical theory of packet switching and queueing networks. Provided the analytical foundation required to engineer packet-switched systems at scale.

Louis Pouzin
Created the datagram concept and designed the CYCLADES network. Established the end-to-end model that directly shaped TCP/IP’s architectural philosophy.

Gérard Le Lann
Contributed early analysis to TCP design, reliability mechanisms, and distributed systems behavior. Helped translate datagram theory into transport-layer reality.

J.C.R. Licklider
Articulated the vision of a globally interconnected network of computers and funded the research communities that produced packet networking and internetworking.

Robert Taylor
Directed and unified ARPA networking research, initiating the ARPANET project and creating the institutional conditions for internetworking to emerge.

Lawrence Roberts
Architected and led the ARPANET, transforming packet-switching theory into an operational network and introducing early gateway concepts.

Yogen Dalal
Co-author of early TCP specifications. Defined key aspects of connection management, retransmission behavior, and protocol semantics.

Carl Sunshine
Early TCP designer whose technical work helped shape packet formats, reliability behavior, and host-to-host communication models.

David D. Clark
Chief Internet Architect during the Internet’s formative years. Co-authored the End-to-End Arguments and guided architectural coherence and protocol evolution.

David P. Reed
Co-author of the End-to-End Arguments and contributor to TCP/IP modeling and congestion analysis. Influenced scalability and reliability principles.

Jon Postel
Steward of the RFC series and founder of IANA. Defined protocol governance, naming conventions, and interoperability rules that made the Internet coherent.

Steve Crocker
Created the RFC process, establishing the open, iterative standards mechanism that enabled global collaboration and protocol stability.

Elizabeth Feinler
Directed the Network Information Center. Created early naming, directory, and registry systems essential to Internet coordination and operation.

Peter Kirstein
Led the first international ARPANET and TCP/IP connections. Proved internetworking functioned across national boundaries.

Pål Spilling
One of the earliest international TCP/IP implementers. Validated TCP/IP outside the United States and helped establish the Internet as a global system.

Kahn conceived open-architecture internetworking at DARPA. Cerf co-developed TCP/IP. Their achievement was one of synthesis: integrating packet switching from Baran and Davies, datagram networking from Pouzin and Le Lann, and the work of numerous contemporaries into a single interoperable protocol suite. That contribution was decisive, but it was not singular creation.

The “Fathers of the Internet” label, reinforced by honors such as the 2004 Turing Award, acknowledges leadership and synthesis. It does not describe literal authorship of the Internet itself.

When examined through the lens of building a global Internet, meaning the physical realization of worldwide reach through international private lines, backbone interconnection, operational guarantees, and commercial deployment, the distinction becomes unavoidable. Protocol designers defined how data could move. Others built the systems that allowed that movement to occur at planetary scale.

Writing protocols defines possibility.
Building a global network determines reality.

That distinction is essential for accurate attribution, and it is the dividing line between architectural theory and historical fact.

Protocols, Infrastructure, and the Moment the Internet Became Real

TCP/IP and the World Wide Web defined how data could move and how information could be presented. They did not create a usable Internet.

Protocols operate only after networks exist. They assume physical connectivity, routing agreements, redundancy, power, cooling, security, operational discipline, and capital investment. None of these are provided by protocol specifications or browser software.

Prior to 1996, TCP/IP and the Web functioned primarily within isolated regional networks, academic institutions, and corporate intranets. A website could be written, standards-compliant, and operational, yet remain inaccessible to most of the world. Global reach was not guaranteed, performance was unpredictable, and secure end-to-end commerce was not viable.

The limitation was not software. It was infrastructure.

The Internet did not become a global system because protocols improved. It became global when a true network of networks existed that operated as a single, unified platform. That required international private circuits, direct interconnection with Tier 1 providers, enforceable service levels, operational redundancy, and the financial willingness to deploy them at worldwide scale.

Once that network existed, adoption followed immediately.

The growth of websites, users, and electronic commerce was not speculative. It was delayed demand released the moment global connectivity became reliable, secure, and ubiquitous. The sharp inflection in Internet usage that followed was the consequence of infrastructure finally catching up to long-available software.

This convergence changed everything. Information, communication, and commerce ceased to be regional. Civilization began operating on a single, synchronized digital platform.

That moment did not occur when protocols were written or browsers were released. It occurred when the Internet itself became operational at global scale, when a true network of networks functioned as one system. That condition was first achieved through the founding and deployment of Digital Island.

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Contact and Book Details

How to Contact Mr. Nichols

For speaking invitations, educational programs, institutional engagements, or related inquiries, you may call or text 1-775-600-3400, or email [email protected].

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

My daughters were the ones who encouraged me to write this book, suggesting that it could serve as a teaching tool for university-level business students, particularly those studying technology start-ups, entrepreneurial strategy, and the principles behind Wall Street investments and initial public offerings (IPOs).

If you found the above material engaging, I invite you to read the book, which contains far more detail about the adventure of creating the enterprise. The book is concise, under 100 pages, with roughly 20 pages dedicated to images and original documents.

My goal was to create a narrative that weaves together contracts, press releases, photographs, emails, diagrams, and other artifacts, using prose to contextualize each image. Most readers will be able to complete the book in about two hours.

I aimed for a writing style accessible to readers outside the industry while still providing enough depth and technical insight to keep experienced professionals informed and engaged.

From the Epilogue:

So much unfolded so quickly, affecting countless people, reshaping cultures and economies, and producing aftereffects that continue to reverberate today. My hope is that readers appreciate the extraordinary work done by the many remarkable individuals who chose to contribute to Internet-centric telecommunications. Their efforts advanced a profoundly difficult, expensive, and unsecured endeavor with goals that, at the time, seemed nearly impossible.

The world’s commerce, trade, finance, distribution, education, human communication, and the Internet itself were all measurably different before and after the work of the Digital Island team.

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

Mark Nichols, 1994