Who is InterNIC?

I had pretty well decided to have my dot-com, but now came the struggle to understand just what that entailed. There were several entities involved in domain purchase and maintenance, and the services each one offered weren't clear to me. One odd sticking point was "InterNIC fees." No matter who you chose as a registrar, and where you decided to park... no matter who hosted your page... YOU, the domain owner (said the fine print), were responsible for InterNIC fees. Who or what was InterNIC? And how much were these mysterious fees? No-one knew. I tore up the keyboard searching the 'Net for "InterNIC." The more I searched, the less I found ~ and the more confused I became. InterNIC fees began to loom as the strange, unknown quantity. Would these fees break me? Were we talking a dollar a year or fifty dollars a month? With Internet, it could be anything. There just wasn't any frame of reference. Common sense finally prevailed, and I decided that the "fee" was probably a nominal amount, like a tax.