History of Internet and Digital Communication
2000 to 2009

Year Event
2000  
2000 Computers continue to work and the world doesn't come to an end on January 1, 2000 as some feared might happen because of the year 2000 bug.
2000 The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act becomes effective April 21, 2000.
2000 On June 24, 2000 U.S. President Bill Clinton makes the first ever Presidential webcast among the announcements President Bill Clinton announces a new web site that will be able to search all government resources.
2000 Y2000- The US timekeeper (USNO) and a few other time services around the world report the new year as 19100 on 1 Jan
2000 The European Commission contracts with a consortium of 30 national research networks for the development of Géant, Europe's new gigabit research network meant to enhance the current capability provided by TEN-155 (6 Nov)
2000 Internet2 backbone network deploys IPv6 (16 May)
2000 A testbed allowing the registration of domain names in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean begins operation on 9 November. This testbed, created by VeriSign without IETF authorization, only allows the second-level domain to be non-English, still forcing use of .com, .net, .org. The Chinese government blocks internal registrations, stating that registrations in Chinese are its sovereignty right
2000 Emerging Technologies: Wireless devices, IPv6
2000 Viruses of the Year: Love Letter (May)  To the chagrin of the Internet population, deviant computer programmers begin designing and circulating viruses with greater frequency. “Love Bug” and “Stages” are two examples of self-replicating viruses that send themselves to people listed in a computer user's email address book. The heavy volume of email messages being sent and received forces many infected companies to temporarily shut down their clogged networks.
2000 Lawsuits of the Year: Napster, DeCSS
2000 Dotcom Implosion -The Internet bubble bursts, as the fountain of investment capital drives up and the Nasdaq stock index plunges causing he initial public offering (IPO) windown to slam shut and many dotcoms to close their doors
2000 America Online buys Time-Warner for $16 billion.  Its the biggest merger of all time.
2000 Mexico's connection to Internet2 becomes fully operational as the California research network (CalREN-2) is connected with Mexico's Corporación Universitaria para el Desarrollo de Internet (CUDI) network. Though connected in November, the link's inauguration by California's Governor and Mexico's President was not until March of 2001.
2001  
2001 January 1, 2001 - Microsoft announces Windows 95 is now a legacy item and will no longer be sold or shipped to any more customers.
2001 Linus Torvalds releases version 2.4 of the Linux Kernel source code on January 4th.
2001 Bill Gates unveils the Xbox on January 7th 2001.
2001 Napster reaches over 26 million users February 2001.
2001 The man who practically invented the Silicon Valley success story, Hewlett-Packard Co. co-founder William Hewlett, dies at his home, he was 87. 
2001 Chip-making giant Intel Corp. has agreed to acquire Xircom Inc., a maker of mobile computing gear, for about $748 million.
2001 Claude Elwood Shannon, the mathematician who laid the foundation of modern information theory while working at Bell Labs in the 1940s, died on February 24, 2001. He was 85.
2001 March 08, AOL membership surpasses 28 Million.
2001 Microsoft releases Internet Explorer 6.0 in August 27, 2001.
2001 March 09, MacAfee releases first handheld virus protection software.
2001 April 20, Dell computers becomes the largest PC maker.
2001 June 5, 2001, Nevada becomes the first U.S. state to vote to legalize online gambling.
2001 Airlines begin to implement methods of gaining Internet access while flying.
2001 USB 2.0 is introduced.
2001 The first live distributed musical -- The Technophobe & The Madman -- over Internet2 networks debuts on 20 Feb
2001 July 20, 2001 - PC shipments worst since 1986, as only Dell grows.
2001 VeriSign extends its multilingual domain testbed to encompass various European languages (26 Feb), and later the full Unicode character set (5 Apr) opening up most of the world's languages
2001 Forwarding email in Australia becomes illegal with the passing of the Digital Agenda Act, as it is seen as a technical infringement of personal copyright (4 Mar)
2001 Radio stations broadcasting over the Web go silent over actor royalty disputes (10 Apr)
2001 High schools in five states (Michigan, Missouri, Oregon, Virginia, and Washington) become the first to gain Internet2 access
2001 SETI@Home launches on 17 May and within four weeks its distributed Internet clients provide more computing power than the most powerful supercomputer of its time (:par:)
2001 US Dept of Commerce issues a notice of intent on 6 April to turn over management for the .edu domain from VeriSign to Educause. Award agreement is reached on 29 October. Community colleges will finally be able to register under .edu
2001 Napster keeps finding itself embroiled in litigation and is eventually forced to suspend service; it comes back later in the year as a subscription service . A federal judge rules that Napster must remain offline until it can prevent copyrighted material from being shared by its users.
2001 European Council finalizes an international cybercrime treaty on 22 June and adopts it on 9 November. This is the first treaty addressing criminal offenses committed over the Internet
2001 .biz and .info are added to the root server on 27 June with registrations beginning in July. .biz domain go live on 7 Nov.
2001 GÉANT, the pan-European Gigabit Research and Education Network, becomes operational (23 Oct), replacing the TEN-155 network which was closed down (30 Nov)
2001 First uncompressed real-time gigabit HDTV transmission across a wide-area IP network takes place on Internet2 (12 Nov).
2001 Apple introduces the iPod.
2001 Microsoft Windows XP home and professional editions are released October 25, 2001.
2001 Emerging Technologies: Grid Computing, P2P
2001
WikipediaThe popular encyclopedia, Wikipedia is founded
2002  
2002 Excite@Home, one of the largest ISP's files for bankruptcy and closes its doors March, 02, 2002.
2002 PayPal is acquired by eBay on October 3, 2002.
2002 The death knell tolls for Napster after a bankruptcy judge ruled in September that German media giant Bertelsmann cannot buy the assets of troubled Napster Inc. The ruling prompts Konrad Hilbers, Napster CEO, to resign and lay off his staff.Napster files for a Chapter 11 bankruptcy on June 3, 2002.
2002 .Global Terabit Research Network (GTRN) is formed composed of two OC-48 2.4GB circuits connecting Internet2 Abiline, CANARIE CA*net3, and GÉANT (18 Feb)
2002 Federally recognized US Indian tribes become eligible to register under .gov (26 Apr)
2002 Edsger Dijkstra passes away August 6, 2002.
2002 Hundreds of Internet radio stations observe a Day of Silence in protest of proposed song royalty rate increases (1 May)
2002 Cartoon turtle named "Dewie" introduced to help promote Internet safety and security.
2002 Abilene (Internet2) backbone deploys native IPv6 (5 Aug)
2002 Internet2 now has 200 university, 60 corporate, and 40 affiliate members (2 Sep)
2002 Emergence of Blogs
2002 Hundreds of Spain-based web sites take their content offline in protest of a new law that took effect on 12 Oct requiring all commercial Web sites to register with the government
2002 .A new US law creates a kids-safe "dot-kids" domain (kids.us) to be implemented in 2003 (3 Dec)
2002 The FBI teams up with Terras Lycos to disseminate virtual wanted posts across the Web portal's properties (11 Dec)
2002 As of January, 58.5% of the U.S. population (164.14 million people) uses the Internet. Worldwide there are 544.2 million users
2003 .
2003 Skype is a software program that uses the internet to make telephone calls. The software was created by the Swedish and Danish Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis. It is for Microsoft Windows (2000, XP, Vista and Windows Mobile), Mac OS X and Linux. By using VoIP to make the calls, it is very inexpensive to call another phone. It is free to call another Skype user. Every Skype user has a unique username which other users can use to talk with them
2003 Supreme court rules that sex offenders information and pictures can be posted online on March 3, 2003.
2003 Intel Pentium M is introduced in March.
2003 Apple Computer introduces Apple iTunes Music Store, which allows people to download songs for 99 cents each.
2003 Spam, unsolicited email, becomes a server-clogging menace. It accounts for about half of all emails.
2003 The first computer is infected with the Spybot worm on April 16, 2003.
2003 The Mozilla Foundation is officially formed on July 15, 2003.
2003 MySpace is founded.
2003 The first official Swiss online election takes place in Anières (7 Jan)
2003 The SQL Slammer worm causes one of the largest and fastest spreading DDoS attacks ever. Taking roughly 10 minutes to spread worldwide, the worm took down 5 of the 13 DNS root servers along with tens of thousands of other servers, and impacted a multitude of systems ranging from (bank) ATM systems to air traffic control to emergency (911) systems (25 Jan). This is followed in August by the Sobig.F virus (19 Aug), the fastest spreading virus ever, and the Blaster (MSBlast) worm (11 Aug), another one of the most destructive worms ever
2003 Eugene Kleiner passes away November 20, 2003.
2003 Flash mobs, organized over the Net, start in New York and quickly form in cities worlwide
2003 Taxes make headlines as: larger US Internet retailers begin collecting taxes on all purchases; some US states tax Internet bandwidth; and the EU requires all Internet companies to collect value added tax (VAT) on digital downloads starting 1 July
2003 The French Ministry of Culture bans the use of the word "e-mail" by government ministries, and adopts the use of the more French sounding "courriel" (Jul)
2003 The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) sues 261 individuals on 8 Sep for allegedly distributing copyright music files over peer-to-peer networks
2003 Little GLORIAD (Global Ring Network for Advanced Application Development) starts operations (22 Dec), consisting of a networked ring across the northern hemisphere with connections in Chicago, Amsterdam, Moscow, Novosibirsk, Zabajkal'sk, Manzhouli, Beijing, and Hong Kong. This is the first-ever fiber network connections across the Russia-China border
2003 It's estimated that Internet users illegally download about 2.6 billion music files each month.
2003 Spam, unsolicited email, becomes a server-clogging menace. It accounts for about half of all emails. In December, President Bush signs the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act of 2003 (CAN-SPAM Act), which is intended to help individuals and businesses control the amount of unsolicited email they receive.
2003 Broadband Internet subscriptions grew 48% in this year, and it is reported that 39% of adult Internet uses have broadband access at their home
2003 Neilson NetRatings’ reports that the average Web usage in the US was about 36 hours at home and 84 hours at work per month
2004
 

 

2004 Google announces Gmail on April 1, 2004.
2004 Network Solutions begins offering 100 year domain registration (24 Mar)
2004 CERNET2, the first backbone IPv6 network in China, is launched by the China Education and Research Network (CERN) connecting 25 universities in 20 cities at speeds of 1-10Gbps (27 Dec)
2004 Intel starts the development of the BTX form factor.
2004 World of Warcraft
World of Warcraft is released and becomes the world's most popular video game (despite it being banned in the fake Communist China).
2004 Godz MinnionzClan Godz Minnionz, a popular gaming clan is founded.
2004 Firefox 1.0 is first introduced on November 9, 2004.former developers of Netscape & Mosaic
2004 IBM sells its computing division to Lenovo Group for $1.75 billion on December 08, 2004
2004 Internet Worm, called MyDoom or Novarg, spreads through Internet servers. About 1 in 12 email messages are infected.
2004 Online spending reaches a record high—$117 billion in 2004, a 26% increase over 2003.
2004 Rose along with Owen Byrne, Ron Gorodetzky, and Jay Adelson, formed Digg, a technology news website that combined social bookmarking, blogging, RSS, and non-hierarchical editorial control. The website was officially launched to the public on December 5, 2004.[3][11]
2004 Zuckerberg launched Facebook from his Harvard dorm room on February 4, 2004 They first spread it to Stanford, Dartmouth, Columbia, Cornell and Yale, and then to other schools By the beginning of the summer, Zuckerberg and Moskovitz had released Facebook at almost forty-five schools
2005  
2005 YouTube is founded and comes online February 15, 2005.
2005 Yahoo announces that it will acquire the popular photo service Flickr on March 21, 2005.
2005 Lenovo completes the acquisition of IBM's Personal Computing Division.
2005 IBM officially announces on July 14, 2005 that all sales of OS/2 will end on December 23, 2005 and that all support from IBM for OS/2 will end on December 16, 2005.
2005 MySpace is purchased by News Corporation for $580 Million US on July 18, 2005.
2005 On September 12, 2005 eBay acquired Skype for approximately  $2.6billion.
2005 Adobe completes its acquisition of Macromedia on December 3, 2005.
2006  
2006 .The blu-ray is first announced and introduced at the 2006 CES on January 4, 2006.
2006 SS FreeOn June 25, 2006, the SS Free is founded and becomes the world's most popular community.
2006 On August 6, 2006 MySpace announces its 106 millionth account was created.
2006 Skype announced that it had over 100 million registered users.
2006 The GIF standard and pictures becomes officially free on October 1, 2006.
2006 Google announces plans to purchase YouTube for 1.65 Billion on October 9, 2006.
2006  AOL announces that they will give for free virtually every service for which it charged a monthly fee, with income coming instead from advertising.
2006 There are more than 92 million websites online.
2006 Wikipedia has over six million articles in 250 languages including 1.6 million in the English-language edition and is ranked among the twelve most-visited websites worldwide.
2007  
2007 Apple introduces the iPhone to the public at the January Macworld Conference & Expo.
2007 On May 24, 2007, Zuckerberg announced a Facebook Platform, a development platform for programmers to create social applications within Facebook. This announcement sparked a great deal of interest in the developer community. Within weeks, many applications had been built and some already had millions of users. Today, there are more than 400,000 developers around the world building applications for Facebook Platform.
2007 Apple releases the Apple iPhone to the public June 29, 2007.
2007 Apple surpasses one billion iTunes downloads. (Feb)
2007 Legal online music downloads triple to 6.7 million downloads per week.
2007 Colorado Rockies' computer system crashes when it receives 8.5 million hits within the first 90 minutes of World Series ticket sales
2007 The online game, World of Warcraft, hits a milestone when it surpasses 9 million subscribers worldwide in July.
2007 Jack Dorsey grows interested in the simple idea of being able to know what is friends were doing. In May 2007 Twitter Incorporated is founded.
2007 1.114 billion people use the Internet according to Internet World Stats. (March)
2007 Search engine giant Google surpasses Microsoft as "the most valuable global brand," and also is the most visited Web site. (April)
2008  
2008 In a move to challenge Google's dominance of search and advertising on the Internet, software giant Microsoft offers to buy Yahoo for $44.6 billion. The acquisition is unsuccessful
2008 Microsoft is fined $1.3 billion by the European Commission for further abusing its dominant market position, and failing to comply to their 2004 judgment, which ordered Microsoft to give competitors information necessary to operate with Windows. Since 2004, Microsoft has been fined a total of $2.5 billion by the Commission for not adhering to their ruling.
2008 In a San Fransisco federal district court, Judge Jeffrey S. White orders the disabling of Wikileaks.org, a Web site that discloses confidential information. The case was brought by Julius Baer Bank and Trust, located in the Cayman Islands, after a disgruntled ex-employee allegedly provided Wikileaks with stolen documents that implicate the bank in asset hiding, money laundering, and tax evasion. Many web communities, who see the ruling as unconstitutional, publicized alternate addresses for the site and distributed bank documents through their own networks. In response, Judge White issues another order to stop the distribution of bank documents.
2008 Apple introduces its latest line of Apple iMac computers on August 28, 2008.
2008 Joost today launched its new Flash-based, download-free global web video service at www.joost.com. In addition, Joost features a number of social tools which are designed to help people navigate through the largest online library of legal video programming and to integrate user expression directly into the service.
2008 Google still innovating on 10th anniversary
2008  
2009  
2009 April 29, 2009 - Internet2 members attending their Spring Member Meeting in Arlington, Virginia, witnessed how leading- edge “telepresence” technology can be harnessed to advance important telehealth initiatives. The demonstration, developed by Internet2 and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, connected a local psychiatrist with a remotely located “wounded warrior” veteran patient for a simulated psychiatric diagnosis session. The demonstration represented the first Cisco TelePresence session held over the Internet2 Network
2009 Universities Angle for Billions to Build Obama's New Broadband Network Several higher-education information-technology groups are now working to influence the national broadband strategy through private conversations with agency officials and a white paper, "Unleashing Waves of Innovation: Transformative Broadband for America's Future," filed with the NTIA.
2009

TR10: Intelligent Software Assistant Adam Cheyer is leading the design of powerful software that acts as a personal aide.The initial version, to be released this year, will be aimed at mobile users and will perform only specific types of functions, such as helping make reservations at restaurants, check flight status, or plan weekend activities. Users can type or speak commands in casual sentences, and the software deciphers their intent from the context

2009 Adobe releases Air 1.0. Kevin Lynch, chief software architect at Adobe, talks about a new generation of Web applications that will allow users to shift easily between private data stored on the desktop and public data stored on the Web. He also looks ahead five and ten years to possible future technologies.
2009 Targeted advertising has proved hugely successful for online businesses. Google makes its billions through the AdWords system, which allows advertisers to place their messages alongside search results, blogs entries, or e-mails containing certain keywords. Companies have, however, struggled to find effective ways to use social-media sites like Facebook to serve ads that are targeted to users' demographics and tastes. BuzzLogic targets ads to particular sites by focusing on social activity that suits a particular ad campaign.
   
   

   
   


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