History of JPNIC
Background
The Internet originated in the US in 1969 as ARPANET, a network that connected four university organizations. In the early years, the medium spread primarily among researchers at universities and laboratories around the world.
With the advent of commercial services in the early 1990s, though, the Internet became popular not only among businesses, but also found its way into ordinary households. With its vast size and extensive reach, the Internet has had a huge influence on our society.
To ensure stabilization of the Internet as a part of our social infrastructure, and to enable the quick and accurate Internet resource management, proper organization for operation and management was required also in Japan.
Overview
The history of the current JPNIC began in 1991 as the JNIC, then in 1993 reorganized itself as a private organization, and in 1997 became a registered organization. Since then it has been consistently conducting activities toward supporting the Internet infrastructure.