On that date, the National Science Foundation's university network backbone, a precursor to the World Wide Web, became operational.

The contrast with typical network usage patterns meant a high volume of people outside the university network were visiting student computers looking for music files.

Education groups had challenged the FCC rules because they said the requirements would impose burdensome new costs on private university networks.

Wixom is also co-executive director of Teradata University Network, a learning portal sponsored by Teradata that has participation from vendors such as Microstrategy.