The primary purpose of the project was to challenge the monopoly of InterNIC, the official governing body for generic top-level domains (gTLDs) until the creation of the ICANN in 1998.
Domain names began to play a crucial role in business visibility, and the number of registrations grew exponentially.
In 1995, the National Science Foundation authorized Network Solutions (NSI), the private company that they had mandated to maintain and operate the registries, to begin charging registrants an annual fee.
AlterNIC started operating their registries even though their name servers were not included in the Internet official root zone.
A notable feature of AlterNIC was the possibility to request a new custom TLD for the same price as for registrations in existing TLDs.
The civil lawsuit was quickly settled, but NSI had also contacted the FBI to investigate whether Kashpureff had broken federal computer crime laws.
The hijacking was made possible using a DNS cache poisoning attack, exploiting a security vulnerability in versions of BIND earlier than 4.9.6.