Wikipedia Internet Protocol: Reference Audit | Network, Not Protocol

Of the 35 citations in the Wikipedia article Internet Protocol, 7 carry the sentence that cites them, 20 carry it in part, 2 do not carry it and 6 cannot be checked, and the article’s own sources contradict its account of the early version numbers: the specifications it cites for versions 2 and 4 give address-length fields of 4 bits and 8 bits, which count to 15 and 255 octets and not to 16 and 256, and the RFC it cites for TUBA as IP version 9 names no version number, while the IANA registry it cites elsewhere assigns version 9 to that RFC.

Preamble: I audit the Wikipedia article Internet Protocol footnote by footnote, opening the source that each footnote cites and reading it against the sentence that cites it. This page is the companion of Disagreement 17 in the standing index of the series, Disagreements of Published Claims | Network, Not Protocol, and the article lines cited on this page are the numbered lines of Exhibit A of Wikipedia Defines the Internet Protocol: Disagreements | Network, Not Protocol. The method and the five grades are the same as on Wikipedia Robert Cailliau: Reference Audit | Network, Not Protocol.

Opinion Rules: You are visiting my record, and I am the subject matter expert on it. If you are a subject matter expert too, I want to hear from you: bring your document and I will answer it on the record. If you are not, you are welcome here to read and to learn. The documented-challenge terms of marknichols.com and the condition on opinion are stated at F40 of The Governing Definitions and Controlling Facts of Telecommunications Internetworking, and they govern this page.

Conditional on the Governing Definitions: Every finding on this page is conditional on the Governing Definitions D1 through D13 of marknichols.com, which are reproduced in full in the Definitions Addendum at the bottom of this page.

0.0 This section records the article this page audits, the method of the audit, and the grades it assigns.

0.1 The article audited on this page is Internet Protocol of the English Wikipedia at revision 1381410383 of October 22, 2026, the revision that Exhibit A of Disagreement 17 reproduces. Wikipedia’s revision history records revision 1382802385 of October 30, 2026, a change of links from http to https by the account SchlurcherBot, as the latest revision of the article on November 14, 2026. The article carries 32 numbered footnotes, which it cites 35 times. This page read the list of footnotes, the links of each footnote and the sentences that cite each footnote in revision 1381410383 through Wikipedia’s own public interface on November 14, 2026.

0.2 This page audited each footnote on November 14, 2026, by opening the source at the link the footnote gives, at the archived copy that the footnote names where the original is gone, and, where neither reaches the source, at an archived copy that this page identifies in the unit that grades it. Six sources were read in full, twenty-one were retrieved in full and read at the passages that bear on the sentence they support after a search of the whole text, and five could not be read, and the unit that grades each source states which. Three of the sources, Internet Experiment Notes 28 and 41 and the paper of May 1974, are scans with no text layer and were read by optical character recognition of every page.

0.3 Each citation receives one of five grades. Supported means that the source carries the sentence in its own words. Partial means that the source carries part of the sentence and not the rest. Not supported means that the source was read and does not carry the sentence. Uncheckable means that the citation cannot be followed to a readable source. Unread means that the source was not read for this page.

0.4 The sources are quoted on this page in short fragments, and the rest of what each source says is stated in the words of this page. The sentences of the article are quoted from Exhibit A of Disagreement 17. Exhibit A omits the article’s references, so the footnotes are named on this page by their numbers in revision 1381410383 and not by a line of the exhibit.

1.0 Each of the 32 footnotes of the article is graded at each sentence that cites it.

1.1 Footnote 1 cites “The Economics of Transition to Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6)” of the OECD Digital Economy Papers, November 6, 2014, for line 19, which says that IPv6 has been in increasing deployment since around 2006. The publication page, read in full, gives an abstract with no year 2006, and the report itself failed to load on two attempts. Footnote 1 is graded Uncheckable.

1.2 Footnote 2 cites “IP Functions” of The TCP/IP Guide by Charles M. Kozierok for line 21. The page, fully read, names the four functions of addressing, data encapsulation, fragmentation and reassembly, and routing, and the citation is graded Supported.

1.3 Footnote 3 cites “IP Technologies and Migration” of EITC, in the copy archived on January 5, 2021 that the footnote names, for line 30. The page carries the sentence of line 30 word for word, and the citation is graded Supported. The page names no author and no date.

1.4 Footnote 4 cites an article of Róża Goścień, Krzysztof Walkowiak and Mirosław Klinkowski in Computer Networks of 2015 for line 37, the description of anycast. The publisher’s site served an error page in place of the article, and footnote 4 is graded Uncheckable.

1.5 Footnote 5 cites “A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication” by Vinton G. Cerf and Robert E. Kahn for line 41, which says that the IEEE published the paper in May 1974. The copy at Princeton, read in full by optical character recognition, carries the notice “IEEE Trans on Comms, Vol Com-22, No 5 May 1974” on every page, and the citation is graded Supported.

1.6 Footnote 6 cites the “Internet Experiment Note Index” of the RFC Editor for line 46, which introduces the Internet Experiment Notes that describe the evolution of the Internet Protocol into IPv4. The page, fully read, is a directory listing of file names with no titles, dates or descriptions, and the citation is graded Not supported.

1.7 Footnote 7 cites “Where is IPv1, 2, 3, and 5?” by Stephen Coty of Alert Logic, February 11, 2011, in the copy archived on August 2, 2020 that the footnote names, because the live address now opens the home page of LevelBlue. The post, fully read, dates TCP version 1 to 1973 and version 2 to March 1977, says that TCP and IP were split at version 3 in the spring of 1978, and calls version 5 a failed attempt at streams under RFC 1190. At line 59, the citation is graded Partial, because the post speaks of versions of TCP and calls no versions of IP experimental. At line 64, the citation is graded Partial, because the post does not name the Internet Stream Protocol.

1.8 Footnote 8 cites Internet Experiment Note 28, “Draft Internetwork Protocol Specification Version 2” by Jonathan B. Postel, February 1978, for line 60, which says that versions 2 and 3 supported variable-length addresses of 1 to 16 octets. The note, read in full by optical character recognition, says that addresses are variable length in multiples of octets and gives the destination and source address lengths in fields of 4 bits. The citation is graded Partial, because the note states no range of lengths and does not describe version 3.

1.9 Footnote 9 cites Internet Experiment Note 41, “Internetwork Protocol Specification Version 4” by Jonathan B. Postel, a draft of June 1978, for line 61, which says that an early draft of version 4 supported addresses of up to 256 octets. The note, read in full by optical character recognition, gives variable-length addresses with length fields of 8 bits, and it gives neither the figure 256 nor the later fixed address. The citation is graded Partial.

1.10 At line 69, the article says that as of January 2023 most countries show significant adoption of IPv6, with over 41% of Google’s traffic carried over IPv6, and it cites footnotes 10 and 11. Footnote 10 cites “IPv6 Adoption in 2021” by Stephen Strowes of RIPE Labs, June 4, 2021, which reports significant deployment in several named countries and a nontrivial list of countries with none. Footnote 11 cites Google’s IPv6 statistics, which on the day this page read them showed 48.54% of users reaching Google over IPv6 on November 13, 2026. Both citations are graded Partial, because neither source carries the date of January 2023, the figure of 41%, or traffic in place of users.

1.11 Footnote 12 cites “It was almost IPv7”, a reader comment on an O’Reilly weblog post of October 1, 2003, signed Geoff Mulligan, in the copy archived on July 5, 2015 that the footnote names, for line 70. The comment, fully read, says that the version of IPng was going to be 7 until due diligence, the RFCs and Jon Postel showed that 6 was free, and the citation is graded Supported.

1.12 Footnote 13 cites the registry “IP Version Numbers” of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, last updated January 28, 2021, for line 71, which says that 7 (IP/TX), 8 and 9 were assigned and are historic. The registry, fully read, lists 7, 8 and 9 as reserved and historic and names RFC 1475 for 7, RFC 1621 for 8 and RFC 1347 for 9. The citation is graded Partial, because the registry gives no name “IP/TX”.

1.13 Footnote 14 cites RFC 1606, “A Historical Perspective On The Usage Of IP Version 9” by J. Onions of Nexor Ltd., dated 1 April 1994, for line 72, which says that the IETF published an April Fools’ Day RFC about IPv9 on that date. The RFC carries the date and the subject and does not use the words April Fools’ Day or name the IETF as its publisher, and the citation is graded Partial.

1.14 Footnote 15 cites RFC 1347, “TCP and UDP with Bigger Addresses (TUBA)” by Ross Callon of DEC, June 1992, for line 73, which says that IPv9 was used in the proposal called TUBA. The RFC, searched in full, assigns and names no IP version number, and the citation is graded Not supported.

1.15 The table of version numbers at lines 77 through 93 cites nine footnotes. Footnote 16, a book of Jeff Doyle and Jennifer Carroll of 2006 with no link, is cited at line 77 and line 85 and is graded Uncheckable at both. Footnote 17, RFC 791 of September 1981, at line 81, describes version 4 and is graded Partial, because it cannot carry the status Active. Footnote 18, RFC 1819 of August 1995, at line 84, describes ST2+ under the version number 5 and was published as Experimental, and it is graded Partial. Footnote 19, RFC 8200 of July 2017, at line 86, describes version 6 and is graded Partial, because it carries no year 1995.

1.16 At line 87, footnote 20, RFC 1475 by R. Ullmann of June 1993, explains why its header format was called “IP version 7”, and footnote 21, RFC 6814 of November 2012, obsoletes RFC 1475 and asks that its status be changed to Historic, and both citations are graded Partial. At line 88, footnote 22, RFC 1621 by P. Francis of May 1994, places Pip in 1992 and 1993 and its merger with SIP in mid 1993 and names no version number, and it is graded Partial. At line 89, footnote 23, RFC 1347, describes TUBA of June 1992 and names no version number, and it is graded Partial. At line 90, footnote 24, RFC 1606, carries IP version 9 and the date 1 April 1994 and does not call itself a joke, and it is graded Partial.

1.17 Footnote 25 cites RFC 1122, edited by R. Braden, October 1989, at its section 1.1.3, for line 100. The section says that IP datagrams may arrive damaged, duplicated, out of order, or not at all, and the citation is graded Supported.

1.18 At line 108, the article says that IPv6 operates without header checksums because link layers are assumed to detect errors, and it cites footnotes 19 and 26. RFC 8200 at footnote 19, searched in full, speaks only of the checksums of upper-layer protocols. RFC 1726 at footnote 26, by C. Partridge and F. Kastenholz, December 1994, argues at its section 6.2 that an IPng checksum is not required because data links carry stronger checks. Both citations are graded Partial, because neither source describes IPv6 as it operates.

1.19 Footnote 27 cites the book Wireless Communication by Anand Rishabh for line 111, and Google Books served its page as an image with no readable text, so footnote 27 is graded Uncheckable. Footnote 28, Inside TCP/IP by Karanjit Siyan of 1997 with no link, cited at line 113, is graded Uncheckable.

1.20 Footnote 29 cites “IPv6 Fragmentation” by Bill Cerveny of Arbor Networks, July 25, 2011, in the copy archived on September 16, 2016 that the footnote names, for line 114. The post says that routers and firewalls cannot fragment an IPv6 packet and that the source node must send packets no larger than the path MTU or fragment them, and the citation is graded Supported.

1.21 Footnote 30 cites “Basic Journey of a Packet” by Don Parker on the Symantec community site, which the page dates July 6, 2006, for line 116, which says that UDP and ICMP leave fragmentation to IP. The page says that an application using UDP leaves fragmentation to the IP layer and does not mention ICMP, and the citation is graded Partial.

1.22 Footnote 31 cites “Security Assessment of the Internet Protocol”, written by Fernando Gont on behalf of CPNI and dated July 2008, in the copy archived on February 11, 2010 that the footnote names, for line 119, and the citation is graded Supported. Footnote 32 cites RFC 6274, Fernando Gont’s assessment of July 2011 published by the IETF, for line 120, which says that the IETF has been pursuing further studies. The RFC is itself the IETF’s publication of the assessment and says nothing of further studies, and the citation is graded Partial.

2.0 The sources contradict the article’s figures for early address lengths and its version number for TUBA, and the table of versions rests on dates and statuses that its sources do not give.

2.1 At line 60 and line 61, the article gives address lengths of 1 to 16 octets for versions 2 and 3 and of up to 256 octets for a draft of version 4. The sources it cites give length fields of 4 bits in Internet Experiment Note 28 and of 8 bits in Internet Experiment Note 41, and a field of 4 bits counts from 0 to 15 and a field of 8 bits counts from 0 to 255.

2.2 At line 73 and line 89, the article ties IP version 9 to TUBA and cites RFC 1347, which names no version number. The registry of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, cited at line 71 and not at those lines, assigns version 9 to RFC 1347 as reserved and historic.

2.3 The table at lines 77 through 93 lists versions 1, 2 and 3 as experimental versions of 1973, 1977 and 1978 with no footnote, and the registry cited at line 71 lists 0 and 1 as reserved and 2 and 3 as unassigned. The post cited at line 59 dates versions of TCP and not of IP.

2.4 The table dates IPv6 to 1995 and cites RFC 8200 of July 2017, and it dates the P Internet Protocol to 1994 while saying that it merged into SIP in 1993. RFC 1621, the source of that row, places Pip in 1992 and 1993 and its merger in mid 1993, and is itself dated May 1994.

2.5 At line 69, the figure for January 2023 is cited to an article of June 2021 and to a live page that measures users and changes daily, and on November 13, 2026 that page showed 48.54%.

2.6 The source at footnote 3 carries the sentence of line 30 word for word and names no author or date, so the source may repeat Wikipedia rather than support it. The source at footnote 12 is a reader comment in which Geoff Mulligan describes his own part in naming IPv6.

2.7 The paper of May 1974 at footnote 5, cited at line 41, names its protocol TCP throughout and does not name a separate Internet Protocol, which Disagreement 17 records in its section 2.0.

3.0 Many lines of the article carry no footnote, and the sources of other footnotes bear on several of them.

3.1 Of the 120 lines of Exhibit A, lines 19, 21, 30, 37, 41, 46, 59, 60, 61, 64, 69 through 73, 77, 81, 84 through 90, 100, 108, 111, 113, 114, 116, 119 and 120 carry footnotes, and every other line carries none.

3.2 The rows at line 78, line 79 and line 80 carry no footnote, and the registry cited at line 71 lists those version numbers as reserved or unassigned.

3.3 The row at line 82 gives version 5 to the Internet Stream Protocol of 1979 with no footnote, and RFC 1819, cited at line 84, says that ST has been assigned the value 5.

4.0 Of the 35 citations, 7 carry the sentence that cites them, 20 carry it in part, 2 do not carry it, and 6 cannot be checked.

4.1 Counted by footnote, footnotes 2, 3, 5, 12, 25, 29 and 31 are graded Supported, footnotes 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 26, 30 and 32 are graded Partial, footnotes 6 and 15 are graded Not supported, and footnotes 1, 4, 16, 27 and 28 are graded Uncheckable.

4.2 The two citations graded Not supported are footnote 6 at line 46, a listing of file names, and footnote 15 at line 73, an RFC that names no version number for TUBA.

5.0 The claims on this page are open to documented challenge on the standing terms of marknichols.com, and the terms are stated here in full.

5.1 The claims on this page are open to challenge on the same terms as every claim on marknichols.com. A challenger who holds that a claim on this page is wrong, or that the Internet is something other than the publicly joinable network of networks of the registry lineage defined at The Governing Definitions and Controlling Facts of Telecommunications Internetworking, states the competing claim or definition in one sentence, names the document that carries it and the document’s date, and sends both to mark@marknichols.com. A challenge submitted with its document is answered on this page, and a competing definition submitted with its document is added to this page as an exhibit with attribution to the person who submitted it; a challenge submitted without a document is an opinion and is heard as one.

5.2 The distinction the site’s definition rests on, that protocols enable interoperability and are not the Internet, is stated in the IETF’s own words, RFC 2026 and STD 1, in the Internet-Draft draft-mnichols-protocols-not-the-internet-01, posted by Mark Nichols to the IETF Datatracker on September 25, 2026 at https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-mnichols-protocols-not-the-internet/ and stated on this site at Protocols Are Not the Internet: The IETF Internet-Draft by Mark Nichols, so a challenger may also address the definition in the venue that publishes the protocol standards themselves. Any person who holds expertise in telecommunications and a competing claim or definition is invited to bring both, in writing, with the document.

6.0 The Definitions Addendum reproduces the Governing Definitions D1 through D13 of marknichols.com word for word, and every finding on this page is made under them.

6.1 Every finding on this page is made under the Governing Definitions of marknichols.com, D1 through D13, which are reproduced in this addendum word for word from The Governing Definitions and Controlling Facts of Telecommunications Internetworking. A reader of this page either accepts these definitions or disputes them. A reader who disputes a definition states the competing definition in one sentence and names the dated document that carries it before opining on any finding of this page. A reader who opines on the findings without disputing a definition has read the findings under these definitions by default.

6.2 The definitions below are copied word for word from the section “These definitions are employed throughout marknichols.com” of The Governing Definitions and Controlling Facts of Telecommunications Internetworking, as that page read on November 13, 2026, and that page controls wherever a copy differs from it.

D1. The Internet (capital I). The publicly joinable network of networks of the registry lineage: the fabric whose addresses and autonomous system numbers were issued by the InterNIC and are maintained today by ARIN. A person joins it by purchasing access from any of competing commercial providers, for any lawful purpose, and a network joins it by obtaining addresses and an autonomous system number from the numbering registry and then interconnecting by agreement with any willing network, the way Digital Island joined under autonomous system AS6553, issued August 29, 1996 by the InterNIC, with the registration maintained today in ARIN’s registry. No owner grants admission, no written policy screens members or their purposes, and no government sponsorship is required, and that single property, open admission, is what separates the Internet from every gated network that existed before it. The capital-I Internet was born in 1991, when independently operated commercial networks of this lineage, PSINet, AlterNet under UUNET, and CERFnet, interconnected by their own agreement as the Commercial Internet eXchange (CIX), settlement-free and free of any purpose-screening policy, and it was born small: the gated research world stood beside it until April 30, 1995, upon the decommission of NSFNET folded into internetMCI, per orders of Congress. Neither the ARPANET intranet, which admitted members only by agency authorization, nor the NSFNET intranet, which admitted members only under a written Acceptable Use Policy restricted to research and education, met this definition on any day of either existence, so the capital I names an Internet network that is public, or it names nothing. Paragraphs D1.1 through D1.7 state why the ARPANET and the NSFNET are not in the lineage of the Internet, each on its document.

D1.1 A network stands in the lineage of the Internet only if it carried the trait that defines the Internet, and D1 names that trait as one property, open admission; a network that never carried open admission had no such trait to pass on, and the ARPANET and the NSFNET never carried it, so neither the ARPANET nor the NSFNET is the grandfather, the ancestor, the parent, or the precursor of the Internet, and neither the ARPANET nor the NSFNET became the Internet.

D1.2 The ARPANET admitted members by its owner’s authorization from its procurement to its end: Request for Quotations No. DAHC15 69 Q 0002, issued July 29, 1968 for the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the United States Department of Defense, states the network’s purpose as “making these advanced research computer systems available to users outside their own design circle,” a purpose among the owner’s research contractors, as F37 of this page records; admission ran through agency authorization, as D4 of this page records; and the ARPANET ran from 1969 to 1990, as F38 of this page records, so the ARPANET was an intranet under D2 on every day of its existence and never carried open admission.

D1.3 The NSFNET admitted members only under a written Acceptable Use Policy restricted to research and education, as D7 of this page records, and its backbone was terminated on April 30, 1995, when its regional networks passed principally to internetMCI and SprintLink, which, in the words of Merit Network, the operator of record, absorbed the NSFNET regionals as their customers, so the NSFNET’s member networks joined the Internet as customers on terms the NSFNET never offered, and the NSFNET itself ended and did not become the Internet.

D1.4 The trait that defines the Internet has a documented origin outside the gated networks: the release of March 25, 1991 by General Atomics, Performance Systems International, Inc., and UUNET Technologies, Inc., seated at F52 of this page, states that the three networks “are not subject to government mandated “acceptable use” restrictions on their traffic,” states that the agreement can be expanded “to include any commercial service which has no restrictions on traffic use,” and states that the exchange allows firms to communicate “without traversing the government restricted backbones, such as the NSFNET (National Science Foundation Network),” so the Internet was built by agreement among commercial networks to carry traffic around the gated backbone, and the Internet did not grow out of the gated backbone.

D1.5 The ARPANET, the NSFNET, and the Internet each performed internetworking under D3, and a shared function is not a shared lineage: RFC 2026, The Internet Standards Process, Revision 3, by Scott O. Bradner of Harvard University, published October 1996, states at its section 1.1 that “There are also many isolated interconnected networks, which are not connected to the global Internet but use the Internet Standards,” so a network that uses the same protocols as the Internet is a user of the same tools and is not thereby the Internet or its ancestor. A redwood and a palm are both called trees, and a redwood did not grow from a palm, and a palm cannot become a redwood; the gated internets of the ARPANET and the NSFNET and the capital-I Internet are both called internets, and the shared word names a shared function and not a shared tree. The shared word was applied to the gated networks in error, and this record documents the error by document and date: the Stanford University bronze dedicated July 28, 2005 casts the headline “BIRTH OF THE INTERNET” above an inscription that records protocol work, as Stanford University Is Petitioned to Retract the Headline of Its BIRTH OF THE INTERNET Plaque records; RFC 1208, A Glossary of Networking Terms, by Ole J. Jacobsen and Daniel C. Lynch of Interop, Inc., published March 1991 as a document that in its own words “does not specify an Internet standard,” calls the ARPANET the “grandfather” of today’s Internet with no document for the descent it asserts; and IEEE Milestone 94 of October 29, 2009 is titled “Birthplace of the Internet, 1969,” as F46.1 of this page records.

D1.6 The registry lineage named in D1 is a continuity of numbering administration, the assignment of network addresses and autonomous system numbers by the Network Information Center at SRI, then by the InterNIC, and today by ARIN, and the registry lineage is not a lineage of networks: the Network Information Center at SRI kept the Official Host Table of the ARPANET’s era, as D4 of this page records, and a number assigned by a registry admits no one to any network, so the continuity of the numbering places no gated network in the lineage of the Internet.

D1.7 On every page of marknichols.com, the ARPANET and the NSFNET are named earlier gated networks, networks that also performed internetworking, or intranets under D2, and no page of marknichols.com calls either network the grandfather, the ancestor, the parent, the precursor, or the forerunner of the Internet, places either network in the lineage of the Internet, or states that either network became, evolved into, or grew into the Internet, under the ruling of Mark Nichols of November 7, 2026 that the ARPANET and the NSFNET belong to the history of internetworking and not to the lineage of the Internet, and that the Internet is a separate species.

D1.8 The plain statements of D1.1 through D1.7 are these. The ARPANET is not the Internet. The NSFNET is not the Internet. The ARPANET did not become the Internet. The NSFNET did not become the Internet. The ARPANET is not the grandfather, the ancestor, the parent, or the precursor of the Internet. The NSFNET is not the grandfather, the ancestor, the parent, or the precursor of the Internet. The ARPANET was an intranet, because the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the United States Department of Defense owned the ARPANET and admitted the ARPANET’s members by permission. The NSFNET was an intranet, because the NSFNET backbone admitted members only under a written Acceptable Use Policy restricted to research and education. The Internet admits anyone, and open admission is the one property that defines the Internet. Open admission came to the Internet from the commercial networks PSINet, AlterNet, and CERFnet at the Commercial Internet eXchange announced on March 25, 1991, and open admission did not come from the ARPANET or from the NSFNET. The ARPANET ended in 1990. The NSFNET backbone ended on April 30, 1995. The ARPANET, the NSFNET, and the Internet share the function of internetworking and share the word internet, and a shared function and a shared word are not a shared lineage. The Internet was born in 1991, and the Internet was not born from the ARPANET or from the NSFNET.

D2. intranet. A network, at any scale, in any geography, and under any protocol, whose members join by an owner’s permission. The word carries its own definition: intra means within, and an intranet is a network within a bounded and credentialed community, whether that community is one company’s offices or one government’s contractors spread across two continents. Scale does not convert an intranet into the Internet, geography does not, and protocol does not, because a gated network that adopts the optional protocols TCP/IP has changed its plumbing and not its admission policy; only open admission makes the Internet, and a research intranet is not the Internet. NSFNET and ARPANET are historical examples of intranets under this definition. Neither was the Internet, and neither became the Internet merely by being technically interconnected with other networks.

D3. internetworking. The technique of interconnecting distinct networks through gateways so that traffic originating on one can reach hosts on another. Internetworking among gated intranets was operating in production by 1975, when the gateway at University College London, developed and operated by Peter Kirstein’s group, of which Peter Higginson was a principal member, joined the ARPANET to the United Kingdom’s EPSS, an operation documented in the September 1975 paper of Peter L. Higginson and Andrew J. Hinchley, which recorded the working gateway while filing the Cerf and Kahn protocol as a future option rather than the operating method. Internetworking among gated intranets makes a lowercase internet, in the exact lowercase vocabulary of RFC 1983, and it never makes the capital-I Internet, because interconnecting two gated networks produces a larger gated system, not a public one. The credit for internetworking belongs to the engineers who built and operated the gateways; that credit does not extend to the birth of the Internet, which did not yet exist.

D4. ARPANET, also rendered DARPANET. The ARPA Network: one organization’s intranet, built, funded, owned, and access-controlled by the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the United States Department of Defense, later renamed DARPA, from its commissioning in 1969 until its decommissioning in 1990. Its very name is a possessive, the agency’s initials welded onto the agency’s property, and the network’s renamings followed the owner’s renamings, as only an owned network’s can. Admission was by the owner’s authorization for the owner’s purposes, the Official Host Table of the Network Information Center at SRI, the register of the era’s hosts that preceded the optional protocol DNS, listed 235 hosts in May 1982 and 562 hosts in August 1983, the two counts in RFC 1296 of January 1992 that bracket the 1983 protocol cutover, and no member of the public could join it, buy from it, or sell across it on any day of its twenty-one years. The owner stated the network’s purpose in its own procurement instrument before the network existed: Request for Quotations No. DAHC15 69 Q 0002, issued July 29, 1968 by the Defense Supply Service-Washington of the Department of the Army for the Advanced Research Projects Agency under ARPA Order No. 1260, and signed by Thomas J. Scheblik, Deputy Director for Procurement, solicited the Interface Message Processors for the ARPA computer network, and its Statement of Work, Specifications of Interface Message Processors for the ARPA Computer Network, states that the Agency was forming the network “with the cooperation of its research contractors,” that the network’s potential lay in “making these advanced research computer systems available to users outside their own design circle,” and that the network itself was “a subject of study and experimentation,” while the Statement of Work’s nineteen pages and seven appendices contain no reference to war, to survivability, to attack, to command and control, or to any military mission. The design mission of the ARPANET was therefore resource sharing among the owner’s research contractors, stated by the owner in 1968, and the later recollections agree with the instrument: Charles Herzfeld, Director of ARPA from 1965 to 1967, stated that the ARPANET was not started to create a command and control system that would survive a nuclear attack; Vint Cerf recorded on the Internet Society’s internet-history list on September 1, 2009 that Larry Roberts confirmed the purpose of the ARPANET was resource sharing and that the nuclear resilience story came from Paul Baran’s earlier work; and the Internet Society’s own history, A Brief History of the Internet, calls that story a false rumor that arose from the unrelated RAND study. The wartime mission, command traffic surviving damaged links and destroyed nodes, belonged to the owner’s later internetting project, which Vint Cerf managed at DARPA and demonstrated by putting packet radios in Strategic Air Command aircraft, and the optional protocol TCP, specified in 1974 with military computer communication requirements as the stated primary focus of RFC 793 of September 1981, was designed for that mission and installed on this intranet by the owner’s directive in 1983. The ARPANET is not the Internet, and DARPANET is not the Internet: one organization’s intranet is not the publicly joinable network of networks. The ARPANET intranet was procured under Request for Quotations No. DAHC15 69 Q 0002 of July 29, 1968, ran from 1969, and carried its traffic for fourteen years, under the Network Control Program, an optional protocol first specified in RFC 33 of February 1970, before TCP was added to it on January 1, 1983; a protocol added to a working network fourteen years after the network was procured is an add-on to that network, not its birth.

D5. Flag day, January 1, 1983. A scheduled protocol cutover, from NCP to TCP/IP, planned within the ARPANET community for years and executed on the owner’s own plant: an intranet’s internal maintenance event, touching no member of the public because no member of the public was on the network before the cutover or after it. The protocol installed that day was commissioned by the same owner to weld its own three networks together, the terrestrial ARPANET, its mobile packet radio network, and its satellite network, crossing dissimilar media under a single owner without ever crossing an owner, so that traffic could survive battlefield destruction. The Internet’s own standards registry graded TCP “Recommended” and never “Required,” in RFC 1200 of April 1991 and RFC 2200 of June 1997, grades that bind only systems electing to implement the standard suite, and a protocol cutover on a gated intranet is not the birth of anything. The network the protocol was cut over onto had been procured on July 29, 1968 and running since 1969, fourteen years before that day, so the cutover added a protocol to an existing intranet and created no network.

D6. The Internet protocols, the optional protocols TCP and IP. Protocols are utilities whose messages the networks carry; they are not the networks, and they are not the Internet. Under these Governing Definitions, TCP and IP are optional protocols, and paragraphs D6.1 through D6.13 state the documents on which that definition rests and the judgment of Mark Nichols that completes it.

D6.1 The Internet’s own standards registry, issued first by the Internet Activities Board and later by the Internet Architecture Board, under the title IAB Official Protocol Standards and from RFC 1500 of August 1993 under the title Internet Official Protocol Standards, assigned a status to each listed protocol in twenty-two editions, from RFC 1083 of December 1988 through RFC 2400 of September 1998.

D6.2 Every one of those twenty-two editions lists TCP, the Transmission Control Protocol of RFC 793, at the status “Recommended”, printed “Rec” from RFC 1280 of March 1992 onward, and lists IP, the Internet Protocol of RFC 791, at the status “Required”, printed “Req” from RFC 1280 onward, and not one of the twenty-two editions lists TCP at the status “Required” in any of its tables.

D6.3 RFC 1200 of April 1991, issued by the Internet Activities Board with Jon Postel as editor, and RFC 2200 of June 1997, issued by the Internet Architecture Board with Jon Postel as editor, each define the status “Required” at section 4.2.1 in the words “A system must implement the required protocols”, define the status “Recommended” at section 4.2.2 in the words “A system should implement the recommended protocols”, and define the status “Elective” at section 4.2.3 in the words “A system may or may not implement an elective protocol”, so that by the registry’s own definitions TCP is a protocol that a system should implement and is not a protocol that a system must implement.

D6.4 RFC 1200 of April 1991 and RFC 2200 of June 1997 each open by stating that the edition “describes the state of standardization of protocols used in the Internet” as determined by its board, and each states that “Few protocols are required to be implemented in all systems” because of the variety of possible systems, gateways, terminal servers, workstations and multi-user hosts among them.

D6.5 RFC 1122, Requirements for Internet Hosts -- Communication Layers, edited by Robert Braden for the Internet Engineering Task Force in October 1989 and listed at the status “Required” in RFC 2200 of June 1997, states at its section 1.1.3 that “To communicate using the Internet system, a host must implement the layered set of protocols comprising the Internet protocol suite” and, in the next sentence, that “A host typically must implement at least one protocol from each layer”, so RFC 1122 binds a host that has chosen to communicate using the Internet system, and RFC 1122 requires of that host at least one transport protocol, not TCP.

D6.6 RFC 1122 of October 1989 states at its section 1.1.3 that “There are two primary transport layer protocols at present”, naming TCP and UDP, and that “the set of official Internet transport protocols may be expanded in the future”, states at its section 4.2.1 that “TCP is used by those applications needing reliable, connection-oriented transport service”, and states at its section 4.1.1 that “UDP is used by applications that do not require the level of service of TCP”, so RFC 1122 itself assigns TCP by the needs of the application.

D6.7 RFC 1200 of April 1991 and RFC 2200 of June 1997 each list, at section 6.3, Network-Specific Standard Protocols, the transmission of IP over each type of physical network, ARPANET, X.25, Ethernet, IEEE 802, FDDI and serial lines among them, at the status “Elective”, and each states that “it is elective to support any particular type of physical network” on which IP is transmitted.

D6.8 RFC 2500 of June 1999 prints no status for TCP or for IP, RFC 5000 of May 2008, the last edition of the registry, prints no status for TCP or for IP, and RFC 7100 of December 2013, written by Pete Resnick of Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., obsoletes RFC 5000 and requests that RFC 5000, and therefore STD 1, be moved to Historic status, so the last status that the Internet’s own standards registry ever assigned to TCP is “Recommended”, in RFC 2400 of September 1998.

D6.9 The IP that the registry listed at the status “Required” is version 4 of the Internet Protocol, RFC 791, and the Internet Engineering Task Force standardized a second and separate Internet Protocol, version 6, in RFC 8200 of July 2017, STD 86, by S. Deering and R. Hinden. RFC 6540 of April 2012, BCP 177, titled IPv6 Support Required for All IP-Capable Nodes and written by W. George of Time Warner Cable, C. Donley of CableLabs, C. Liljenstolpe of Big Switch Networks and L. Howard of Time Warner Cable, advises that “IPv6 support is no longer considered optional”, cautions that the term “IP” has become “a generic that can mean IPv4 + IPv6, IPv6-only, or IPv4-only, depending on context and application”, and states that new and updated IP networking implementations “must not require IPv4 for proper and complete function”, so the Internet Engineering Task Force itself used the word optional for an Internet Protocol until April 2012, and the IP version that the registry listed at the status “Required” is, under the Best Current Practice of April 2012, a version that no new or updated implementation may require.

D6.10 The suite’s own members prove reliability is a per-application choice, because the optional protocols UDP of RFC 768, RTP of RFC 1889 of January 1996, which RFC 3550 of July 2003 obsoletes, and QUIC of RFC 9000 all decline TCP’s services while each remains a protocol of the Internet standards track.

D6.11 TCP is an evolutionary option, not a permanent fixture: it replaced NCP on the owner’s intranet in the 1983 cutover, UDP stood beside it from 1980 for applications that declined its services, RTP went around it in 1996 for media that could not wait for retransmission, and QUIC, published in May 2021, is displacing it now by moving reliability into a new protocol carried inside UDP datagrams; the protocols rotate while the Internet persists, and a layer whose occupants rotate is by definition not the thing itself.

D6.12 It is the stated judgment of Mark Nichols that both are optional utilities: TCP optional on the registry’s own grade, and IP optional as a specific protocol, because the registry’s “Required” grade is conditional conformance language that binds only systems electing to implement the standard suite, the election being made before the grade applies, as the words “To communicate using the Internet system” of RFC 1122 and the word optional that RFC 6540 applies to IPv6 both record, and because what internetworking requires is the addressing function, the label that says where a packet should go, while IP is one implementation of that function and not the function itself.

D6.13 Hence the rebrand coinages stated at marknichols.com/internet-protocols/: TCP is better named ESFRP, the Endpoint Segment Failure Retry Protocol, and IP is better named ALP, the Address Label Protocol. The postmen are not the post office, and the protocols are not the Internet.

D7. NSFNET. The National Science Foundation’s backbone, 1986 to 1995: a federation of research intranets joined into a lowercase internet under a written Acceptable Use Policy that restricted carriage to research and education and barred commercial traffic. The dismantling is dated by the operator of record, Merit Network: the replacement architecture was awarded early in 1994, the very high speed Backbone Network Service to MCI and the Network Access Points to Sprint, MFS Datanet, and Bellcore representing Ameritech and PacBell; member networks began moving off in November 1994; the backbone was terminated on April 30, 1995; and the regional networks passed principally to the commercial carriers internetMCI and SprintLink, which, in Merit’s own words, absorbed the NSFNET regionals as their customers. The NSFNET is not the Internet: a backbone admission-screened under a written Acceptable Use Policy restricted to research and education is a gated network, and a gated network is not the publicly joinable network of networks.

D8. The World Wide Web. An application design made by many persons inside and outside CERN, announced publicly on August 6, 1991, three programs of CERN's World Wide Web software, the line-mode client, the basic server and the library of common code, released into the public domain by CERN on April 30, 1993, with NCSA Mosaic released in 1993 putting a graphical browser in front of it. A free application is not an open network: until April 30, 1995, the Web’s principal carriage was the gated research intranets beneath it, research-only carriage under the written policy, and the calendar states the dependency exactly, because CERN's three programs of Web software went public on April 30, 1993, and the gated research fabric beneath most of its hosts was absorbed into the public Internet two years later to the day, on April 30, 1995. The name World Wide Web is a label for a large body of technology in the public domain, made by many persons and bodies inside and outside CERN, as F32.4 of this page states. The World Wide Web is not the Internet: the Web is an application using the Internet platform, and the application is not the platform.

D9. The birth of the Internet, and the absorption. The capital-I Internet was born in 1991, when PSINet, AlterNet under UUNET, and CERFnet, independently operated commercial networks of the registry lineage, established the Commercial Internet eXchange, a settlement-free router interconnection with open admission and no purpose-screening policy, as recorded in the Federal Communications Commission working paper The Digital Handshake by Michael Kende and as announced by the three networks’ operators themselves, General Atomics, Performance Systems International, Inc., and UUNET Technologies, Inc., in their release of March 25, 1991, which states that “The CIX agreement provides for all customers of AlterNet, CERFnet and PSINet to exchange Internet traffic directly, regardless of which network the customer obtains service from, and at no additional cost” and that the three “are not subject to government mandated “acceptable use” restrictions on their traffic,” the release being preserved as message 441 of the com-priv archive at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and seated at F52 of this page; the agreement’s own text and its execution date are still sought, and the ruling stands on the dated announcement, the year, the parties, and the terms until a dated earlier instrument of the same lineage is produced. April 30, 1995 is not the Internet’s birthday; it is the absorption: the day the last written admission policy over the general-purpose research backbone died with the NSFNET, the regional networks passed principally to internetMCI and SprintLink, and the populations that had lived behind the gate joined the Internet that had existed without them since 1991. Being born is not the same as being built, and the Modern Internet, publicly accessible, eCommerce native, media streaming native, and QoS native, was built from 1996 to 1997 on executed documents: the Telecommunications Act signed February 8, 1996, autonomous system AS6553 issued August 29, 1996 by the InterNIC, the $300,000 Cisco Systems agreement of November 1996 to host cisco.com on Digital Island’s Tier-0 network, and production service in the first quarter of 1997, with Cisco Systems, Stanford University, and Visa International as the first customers in sequence.

D10. The Modern Internet. The Internet changed from the legacy Internet to the Modern Internet on the day its internetworking changed from best effort to deterministic, and that day is November 1, 1996, the Effective Date of the Cisco Systems Remote Data Services Agreement, signed for Digital Island, Inc. by Mark Nichols, Director, Global Networks, on November 7, 1996 and for Cisco Systems, Inc. by Hervé Goguely, Director, Global Service Management, on November 8, 1996, under which Cisco Systems became the first customer to buy a contractually guaranteed global service, a network segment exclusively its own with secure transaction services and sub-300 milliseconds round trip, on the architecture Mark Nichols hand-drew in June 1996, redrew as DIGITAL ISLAND DRAFT.1 in July 1996 and DRAFT.2 in October 1996, and registered as AS6553, issued to Digital Island, Inc. on August 29, 1996. An evolution, not a synonym. The capital-I Internet born in 1991 and made general-purpose by the absorption of April 30, 1995 was public but bare: a network anyone could join, and nothing commerce-grade could yet depend on, because open admission supplies members and does not supply performance. The Modern Internet is what that public network evolved into when global commerce was engineered onto it: the enabling of the globalization of eCommerce, of streaming media, and of Quality of Service under signed and enforceable terms, built on Digital Island’s Tier-0 network under autonomous system AS6553 with contractually enforced sub-300-millisecond round-trip performance across major markets, carrying the Merchant Transport product category coined in September 1996, on the architecture designed by Mark Nichols as co-founder and chief architect, the record standing at marknichols.com/architect-of-the-modern-internet/, marknichols.com/merchant-transport/, and marknichols.com/tier-0/. The evolution is dated by the executed record and by the customers who ran on AS6553 in sequence: Cisco Systems in November 1996, Stanford University in 1997, Visa International in the second quarter of 1997, E*TRADE under its global data distribution agreement with Digital Island dated August 1, 1997, as Digital Island’s S-1 records it, Charles Schwab in 1998, and MasterCard in March 1999; Telefónica Data formed a global IP alliance with Digital Island on April 26, 1999, Sun Microsystems and Inktomi invested in Digital Island in December 1999, Microsoft, Intel, and Compaq invested in Digital Island in June 2000, and CERNET, the China Education and Research Network, peered with Digital Island under the contract signed in Beijing on February 25, 1998 and was never a customer. The Modern Internet is therefore dated 1996 to 1997 in executed documents, and the word modern means publicly accessible, commerce-grade, streaming-capable, and QoS-governed, none of which the newborn network possessed.

D11. Usage. On every page of this site, Internet with a capital I means the publicly joinable network of the registry lineage born in 1991 and nothing else; internet in lowercase means any interconnection of networks, including gated ones; gated systems are named what they were, research intranets, whatever their date; and any page, headline, plaque, or biography that assigns the birth of the Internet to 1969, 1974, or 1983 is measured against these definitions and fails, because on each of those dates every network in the claim admitted its members by permission, and any account that assigns the birth to April 30, 1995 is measured against these definitions and fails as well, because on that date the Internet already existed and what died was the gate beside it. And on every page of this site, “Required” as a registry grade appears only in quotation marks with its condition stated in the same sentence, that it binds only systems electing to implement the standard suite, except within D6 of this page, where D6.12 states that condition once for every quotation of the registry in D6.1 through D6.11; this site’s own prose never calls any Internet protocol required, because at the level of Internet membership there are no required protocols, only elected ones, and an unconditional “required” applied to an Internet protocol is the registry’s conditional conformance label promoted into a membership law that no document states.

D12. Contemporary primary-source documents control over retrospective accounts, institutional narratives, biographies, media summaries, machine-generated responses, and personal recollections.

D13. Any finding in this record may be amended upon production of contemporaneous documentary evidence demonstrating a materially earlier, later, or contrary fact.