The first company to sell ordinary people internet access opened in 1989
Until the late 1980s the internet belonged to government labs and universities. Then, in November 1989, a small company called The World in Brookline, Massachusetts signed up its first paying customer. Dial-up providers mushroomed, but cable and phone companies, already wired into homes, soon swallowed most of the market.
The network began as ARPAnet, linking research laboratories and university departments. Others connected directly to its backbone or through intermediaries, sometimes over dial-up tools such as UUCP. In the 1980s services like CompuServe, Prodigy and America Online offered email and other limited features, but not the full internet. Commercial restrictions started to fall around 1991, just after the World Wide Web appeared, and the last ones went in 1995 when NSFNET was switched off.
Early providers in Australia and the United States charged a monthly fee for dial-up connections over ordinary phone lines. Starting one was cheap, so hundreds competed. Broadband changed the economics: cable television firms and telephone carriers could deliver far faster service through cable modems and DSL over wires they already owned. In places such as the United States, a crowded market narrowed to effective monopolies or duopolies.
Behind the home connection sits a hierarchy. Just as customers pay their provider, smaller providers pay larger upstream networks for transit, a chain that may repeat several times before reaching a tier 1 carrier at the top. Mid-tier networks buy transit yet often swap traffic freely with peers, while the smallest tier only buys. Routers find their way between these networks using the Border Gateway Protocol. Virtual providers own no infrastructure at all, reselling a wholesaler's lines under their own brand.
Regulation has swung back and forth. In February 2015 the US Federal Communications Commission adopted net neutrality rules treating broadband as a common carrier; a later chairman, Ajit Pai, led their repeal, which took effect on 11 June 2018. Providers also attract criminals: in 2026 attackers breached six Japanese providers, affecting up to 14 million customers.
Source: Internet service provider
