EUnet

A separate company, EUnet GB, was founded in 1993 in the United Kingdom, which also played a role in the early commercial Internet in the UK.

[5] Once there was a central European backbone node that was separate from the expensive telecom network, TCP/IP was adopted in place of store and forward.

[8] EUnet GB Ltd was founded in the United Kingdom by a group of academics as a commercial Internet Service Provider (ISP) in 1993.

Most national EUnet affiliates or subsidiaries predated other commercial Internet offerings in the respective countries by many years.

During the same period, as part of an industrial political strategy to stop US domination of future network technology, the European Community embarked on efforts to promote OSI protocols, founding for example RARE and associated national "research" network operators (DFN, SURFnet, SWITCH to name a few).