Autonomica Ab is a fully owned subsidiary of NetNod that operates several critical infrastructure pieces on the Internet.
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Autonomica was founded in 1998, as a subsidiary to NetNod. The Swedish Operator Forum had for a while been discussing extending the operations of NetNod to include common infrastructure services, as well as taking on staff. It was decided that NetNod would form a separate entity for the operation of the Internet Exchange Point and that that would also be chartered to do research in Internet Technology with a main focus on DNS. Autonomica was set up with three staff, one responsible for co-ordination of the operation of the IXes and two that where moved from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. It was also agreed between the Swedish University Network SUNET, and Autonomica that Autonomica would take over the responsibility for running the i.root-servers.net. In addition to that, Autonomica was also to operate the .SE slave servers at each of the four original Netnod Exchanges.
As Netnod's parent is a non-for profit foundation, so Autonomica. All surplus will be handed to the foundation to be used as grants for "good for the Internet" projects.
Autonomica was originally to focus on "research". The work came to focus on what can best be described as engineering and applied research, as often is the case with Internet related technology, such as the work in the IETF. Autonomica staff has since the start been very active in the IETF and among other things co-chaired the IETF DNSOP working group, multi6 working group (now closed), shim6 working group and the v6ops working group. Autonomica staff has also served on the IAB. The work done by Autonomica has mainly focused on DNSSEC and Autonomica staff has written many Internet Drafts and RFCs on DNSSEC issues and deployability. Recently a lot of work and presentations has been done on the topic of deploying IPv6 in production environment.
Autonomica staff are also frequently involved in presenting and chairing sessions in operational conferences such as RIPE, APRICOT /APNIC, SANOG, MENOG and Nanog. Autonomica has also helped run several workshops and initiatives among the Swedish Operators.
Autonomica provides several for free services for the good of the Internet, such as i.root-servers.net, one of the 13 Root-servers, and NTP servers tied to UTC. Autonomica also finances its operation by sharing the platform used for Anycast of the i.root-servers.net with several TLDs that make use of the platform.