FAPESP

ISP & telecomops culture

Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo: São Paulo's research-funding foundation whose data-processing team built Brazil's academic network (ANSP), received Jon Postel's delegation of the .br domain in 1989, made the country's first TCP/IP connection in 1991 (to ESnet via Fermilab), and ran .br registration until NIC.br took over.

A research funder that accidentally became a country's internet registry - for sixteen years.

FAPESP is the São Paulo state research foundation, funded by a constitutionally guaranteed share of state tax revenue, and that funding model is why it could do what it did. A guaranteed percentage means long-horizon commitments survive changes of government, which is precisely what infrastructure research requires and almost never gets.

Its place in this history is not as a funder but as an operator. FAPESP built and ran ANSP, connected it to Fermilab, and for roughly five years that single link carried essentially all Brazilian internet traffic to the outside world. It also administered the .br domain and IP address allocation, functions it took on because somebody had to and no other institution existed to do it.

That is an unusual role for a research foundation and it explains the shape of Brazilian internet governance afterwards. The registry function eventually moved to NIC.br, the academic network work continued through RNP and later KyaTera, and the institutional habit of treating the internet as research infrastructure rather than as a telecommunications product survived the transition. Countries where the internet arrived through a carrier ended up with different assumptions.

Also known as: Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo

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