Informally established in the early 1990s, the Federal Networking Council (FNC) was later chartered by the US National Science and Technology Council'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 United States federal executive departments, executive department of the federal government of the United States, U.S. federal government charged with coordinating and superv ...

(DoD), the

National Science Foundation The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) is an Independent agencies of the United States government#Examples of independent agencies, independent agency of the Federal government of the United States, United States federal government that su ...

, the Department of Energy, and the

National Aeronautics and Space Administration The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agency of the US federal government responsible for the United States's civil space program, aeronautics research and space research. Established in 1958, it su ...

(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 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 network, global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a internetworking, network of networks ...

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 Robert Kahn. He has received honorary degrees and awards that inclu ...

, John Gage, 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, receiv ...

, Ike Nassi, Stewart Personick and Stephen Wolff.

References

Computer networking {{network-stub