InterNIC
The Company InterNIC (Internet Network Information Center) was developed by three companies and the US government (represented by the National Science Foundation ) founded in 1993rd The InterNIC was primarily responsible for the assignment and administration of IP addresses , but commissioned the founding companies involved with a large part of the services, such as the directory and database services to AT&T , the registration services to Network Solutions , Inc. and the information services to General Atomics / CERFnet .
At the end of the 1990s, as the size of the Internet increased, so did the criticism of the concentration of Internet administration in the InterNIC. Although InterNIC acted as a commercial construct (e.g. domain price at the time: $ 50 / year, 1997: approx. 1,000,000 .com domains registered alone, plus .net, .org, .edu and .us), it was with Member of Network Solutions , not least because of the monopoly position as the highest registrar, which is regarded as inviolable, rarely noticeable by a market economy service provider. Domain registration could take 1–2 weeks. The security of the services was often criticized by experts, which culminated, for example, in the hijacking of the domain www.internic.net by Eugene Kashpureff . As the pressure grew, the US government issued a resolution in 1998 according to which the tasks of the InterNIC were gradually transferred from August 1999 to October 2000 to the "Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers" ( ICANN ) founded in October 1998 (a newly established, non-commercial organization).
All that remains of InterNIC is the brand name and a website that contains information on the subject of domain registration . Among other things, a Whois service is offered and the registrars of all top level domains are listed. The website operator is ICANN .
The remaining brand name, InterNIC, is a registered service mark of the US Department of Commerce, the use of which has also been licensed to ICANN .
In Germany there is an INTERNIC GmbH that is not related to the actual InterNIC and operates completely independently. It emerged from the data center operation of INTERNET AG.
There has also been an internic GmbH (registered trademark within Austria) in Austria since 1999, which offers domain registrations and operates completely independently of the original InterNIC.