On Thu, 26 July 2001, Robert E. Seastrom wrote:
At the time, the "center of the universe" was AS690, which was paid for by US taxpayer money and consequently had an AUP. The NAPs were envisioned as a transitional mechanism away from that arrangement. A lot of us at the time wondered aloud why NSF needed to provide a stamp of approval on US-based exchange points, as the FIXes, MAE East, and Milo's setup at NASA-Ames were already going concerns without any kind of endorsement from the NSF. Some companies (notably UUnet) thought this was gratuitous enough that they never showed up at any NAPs.
If I recall, the objection was to using ATM for a exchange fabric, because several people thought it was less reliable at the time. I thought UUNET was at the New York NAP (SPRINT Pennsauken, NJ) as well as the MAE-East alternate NAP, which used FDDI. There were several ISPs at that time which only connected to FDDI/Gigaswitch based exchange points, and shunned the ATM exchange points.