NIC.br - the registry that funds the plumbing

Its origin is worth keeping: the work began inside the network team at Fapesp, the Sao Paulo state research foundation, which is where the Brazilian internet started. A national registry grew out of a university networking group, and the continuity of the people is part of why it behaves the way it does.

The funding model is the unusual part, and it is what most countries did not do. Registration fees for .br domains do not go to a shareholder; they fund CERT.br for incident response, Cetic.br for measurement, Ceptro.br for network engineering, Ceweb.br for web technologies, and IX.br for traffic exchange. A registry is a licence to collect a small rent from every domain in a country, and this one was pointed back at the network.

IX.br is the clearest consequence. CGI.br argued from 1998 that traffic exchange points mattered, and the reason given was operational rather than political: before them, data sent between two points in the same city on different networks routinely travelled abroad and back, which cost money, added delay, and exposed the traffic on the way.

The governance model is the other export. CGI.br brings government, industry, academia and civil society into one body with a defined composition, at a time when most countries had either a ministry or a contractor. Whether that model is better is argued about; that it is unusual is not.