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Brazilian Internet is 10 years old

This year, the public use Internet in Brazil completes a decade of existence. In order to celebrate the date, RNP promoted the panel "10 Years of Internet in the Country" on the last day of the 20th Brazilian Symposium on Computer Networks (SBRC). The SBRC 2002 took place in Búzios (RJ) between May 20th and 24th.

The history of the Brazilian open Internet starts in June 1992, during the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (ECO-92), in Rio de Janeiro. Until then, only academic institutions made experimental use of the network. The opening of the Internet was made so that the journalists covering the event and NGOs could have one more means of communicating with the world.

In the panel "10 Years of Internet in the Country", mediated by the columnist Cristina de Luca (from O Globo newspaper), Internet pioneers told a little of that history. Alexandre Grojsgold, RNP's operations director, remembered the struggle against over-regulation: the Special Bureau of Computer Science wanted the OSI (Open System Interconnection) standard to be used instead of the IP (Internet Protocol) one, now adopted all over the world; the telecommunications sector was a federal monopoly; and there was the imposition of a computer science law. "We are libertarian technologists," claimed Michael Stanton, RNP's technological innovation director. At the end of the 1980s, he participated in the assembling of the Bitnet and Internet networks in the country.

"The Internet is neutral; it flows without control, censorship, or restrictions," declared Grojsgold, who also took part in the implantation of the first Bitnet knot in Brazil, in 1988, and in the creation of Rio Network, in 1992. José Roberto Boisson, a professor at PUC-Rio, added: "We saw the development of a technology be made by a community, and not by a company or a group." Boisson was responsible for making the RNP project official, in 1989, when he was the director of CNPq.

Demi Getschko, a member of the Brazilian Internet Steering Committee and responsible for Registro.br, highlighted the importance of the policy established in 1995 for the commercial opening of the sector: "As soon as Embratel announced the service of Internet access, the line of people interested in it rapidly grew. Our concern was avoiding the formation of a monopoly in this area." Getschko helped create the ANSP Network (an Academic Network in São Paulo), in 1988/89. He was also RNP's operation coordinator between 1990 and 1996.

In this initial stage of Internet development, the so-called virtual communities had a fundamental role. Liane Tarouco, coordinator of the implantation of Tchê Network, a state network in Rio Grande do Sul, remembered the first Brazilian virtual communities that formed around the Brasnet and L-Network lists. Tarouco, currently a professor at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, published the first book on networks in the country in 1977.

Carlos Afonso, creator of Alternex (Ibase's BBS and the first Brazilian provider of public access to the Internet), said that the search for package networks and, later, for the Internet happened because the communities preceding the Brazilian NGOs needed to exchange information with other countries about human rights, environment, etc. Afonso is a technological development director of the Information Network for the Third Sector (Rits) and works for the democratization of the access to the Internet. "Our great challenge is universal access," he stressed.

[RNP, 06.07.2002]