EarthLink
American internet company
EarthLink is an American Internet service provider.
Earthlink went public on NASDAQ in January 1997. Much of the company's growth was via acquisition. In 2000, The New York Times described it as the "second largest Internet service provider after America Online".
Overview
EarthLink was formed in 1994, and offers services to residential consumers and businesses. As of 2022, EarthLink claimed to have five million users.
EarthLink business Internet sells business telecom services, IT and virtualization, cloud computing, IT security, digital marketing, colocation, hosted applications, and support services. In 2014, the company stated it owned and operated a U.S. network including 29,421 route miles of fiber, 90 metro fiber rings, and eight data centers.
EarthLink's residential consumer services include wireless, fiber, and satellite internet, streaming content bundles, web hosting and e-commerce. Its products include spam filters, anti-virus protection, and cloud storage.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “EarthLink” as american internet company. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the history & society register because the source frames it as american internet company. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q919511. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1997, 2000, 1994 and 2022.
Later summaries often reconcile disputed chronology or motive more neatly than the contemporary record permits. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.
- Event chronology
- Institutional context
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Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “EarthLink”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow EarthLink primary sources, EarthLink archive and EarthLink research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
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Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “EarthLink” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.