A Piece of Internet History Lost: IO.com Sold, Services To Shut Down

An anonymous reader writes "The former Illuminati Online domain, IO.com, has been sold, and all existing customers will lose all services associated with the domain. A 1990 Secret Service raid on Steve Jackson Games, then owner of the Illuminati Online BBS and later the IO.com domain led to the creation of the EFF and was an important milestone in the fight for online rights. While the domain has been sold in the past, the services offered to customers always remained unchanged. However, this most recent sale, to an unnamed party, will result in all services being dropped on July 1, and people will lose email addresses, web pages, and shell accounts that many have had for 15+ years." Bad news for me — io.com was my first real ISP, and I was hoping to see if I could revive the account.

CARES? Proprietary medium of Commercial Speach.

[Anonymous Coward]

Phone numbers (like 867-5309), IO.Com, Chat account numbers (like IRC, Skype, ICQ), Slashdot uid's; they all have something in common:
jurisdiction.

When you register something, you have no control over it but to administer it for a short while in the influence of the registrar perview.

All these registration systems build a false sense of commerce and security.

Tor, Meshnet, and Peer-to-peer networks are hated because they are devoid of the impulses that cause a registration to be necessary: and those are the limiting of your activities through regulation.

Re:What?

[TheRaven64]

Back in the early '90s, there were two kinds of service that you could dial into (aside from bulletin board systems). Online Service Providers (OSPs) offered a large walled-garden network. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) provided Internet access. ISPs might have hosted some content (e.g. web or FTP sites for their users), but all of this content was accessible by anyone on any ISP. OSPs hosted content that was only visible within their network. Often, OSPs didn't use TCP, but many of them did provide Internet access via some tunnelling mechanism. Quite often, OSPs would charge more for Internet access than for access to their internal network. Two of the big OSPs were AOL and CompuServe. These typically gave you a fixed number of normal minutes online per month, but charged you more per minute for premium services, of which Internet access was one.