Informally established in the early 1990s, the Federal Networking Council (FNC) was later chartered by the US

National Science and Technology Council The National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) is a council in the Executive Branch of the United States. It is designed to coordinate science and technology policy across the branches of federal government. History The National Science and ...

's Committee on Computing, Information and Communications (CCIC) to continue to act as a forum for networking collaborations among US federal agencies to meet their research, education, and operational mission goals and to bridge the gap between the advanced networking technologies being developed by research FNC agencies and the ultimate acquisition of mature version of these technologies from the commercial sector. The FNC consisted of a group made up of representatives from the

United States Department of Defense The United States Department of Defense (DoD, USDOD or DOD) is an executive branch department of the federal government charged with coordinating and supervising all agencies and functions of the government directly related to national sec ...

(DoD), the

National Science Foundation The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent agency of the United States government that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National ...

, the

Department of Energy A Ministry of Energy or Department of Energy is a government department in some countries that typically oversees the production of fuel and electricity; in the United States, however, it manages nuclear weapons development and conducts energy-re ...

, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), among others. By October 1997, the FNC advisory committee was de-chartered and many of the FNC activities were transferred to the Large Scale Networking group of the Computing, Information, and Communications (CIC) R&D subcommittee of the

Networking and Information Technology Research and Development The Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) program consists of a group of U.S. federal agencies to research and develop information technology (IT) capabilities to empower Federal missions; support U.S. science, en ...

program, or the Applications Council. On October 24, 1995, the Federal Networking Council passed a resolution defining the term

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, pub ...

: :''Resolution: The Federal Networking Council (FNC) agrees that the following language reflects our definition of the term ``Internet''. ``Internet'' refers to the global information system that - (i) is logically linked together by a globally unique address space based on the Internet Protocol (IP) or its subsequent extensions/follow-ons; (ii) is able to support communications using the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) suite or its subsequent extensions/follow-ons, and/or other IP-compatible protocols; and (iii) provides, uses or makes accessible, either publicly or privately, high level services layered on the communications and related infrastructure described herein.' Some notable members of the council advisory committee included: Henriette Avram, Matt Blaze,

Vint Cerf Vinton Gray Cerf (; born June 23, 1943) is an American Internet pioneer and is recognized as one of " the fathers of the Internet", sharing this title with TCP/IP co-developer Bob Kahn. He has received honorary degrees and awards that include ...

John Gage John Burdette Gage (born October 9, 1942) was the 21st employee of Sun Microsystems, where he is credited with creating the phrase The Network is the Computer. He served as vice president and chief researcher and director of the Science Office ...

, Robert Kahn,

Paul Mockapetris Paul V. Mockapetris (born 1948 in Boston, Massachusetts, US) is an American computer scientist and Internet pioneer, who invented the Internet Domain Name System (DNS). Education Mockapetris graduated from the Boston Latin School in 1966, rec ...

Ike Nassi Isaac Robert "Ike" Nassi, born 1949 in Brooklyn, New York, is currently CTO and chairman at TidalScale, Inc. in Campbell, CA, and Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is known for creating (with Ben ...

Stewart Personick Stewart David Personick (born 1947) is an American researcher in telecommunications and computer networking. He worked at Bell Labs, TRW, and Bellcore (now Telcordia Technologies), researching optical fiber receiver design, propagation in multi ...

and Stephen Wolff.

References

Computer networking {{network-stub