In the 1990s, alongside development of the NSFNET was the creation of private commercial network service providers such as CompuServe and America Online. For a monthly subscription fee, these providers allowed anyone who had a personal computer and a modem to communicate with other people on the network through e-mail and chat rooms. There were also numerous existing bulletin board systems (BBS) that users could dial into directly to chat and play games with each other online, without having to use a network service provider.

Each of these networks used different communication protocols, though, so they could not connect to each other. An AOL member could not chat with or send email to a Prodigy member, for example, and the BBS system was not set up to allow individual BBS servers to communicate with other services.

In addition, because these were commercial services, connection to the larger NSFNET was not allowed. Other countries, especially in Europe, also used separate computer networks that functioned independently of the commercial networks in the United States. While there were many networks available for people to use, they were not interconnected sufficiently both because of existing technology and because the goals of the networks were not compatible with each other.