[ih] Jon Postel's papers

[Bill Woodcock]

Not that John needs it, but I corroborate all of his narrative that I was party to or knew of first-hand.

Just to add a little marginalia:

> On Jul 18, 2025, at 22:45, John Gilmore via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> SAIC immediately politicked NSF, which then allowed NSI to charge every domain holder $50/year for their
> formerly free domain names.  This monopoly and SAIC's effort to profit from it on the backs of every Internet user did not sit well with many.

Somewhat later, in 2003, Verisign's greed in monetizing .COM was the proximate cause of the creation of the Great Firewall of China.  While they broke much of the Internet for two weeks with “sitefinder,” the Internet was only broken for about ten days in China.

https://www.icann.org/en/announcements/details/advisory-concerning-demand-to-remove-verisigns-wildcard-3-10-2003-en

> The root zone had been traditionally provided by IANA to NSI's "A root
> server" periodically (by FTP?).  Each of the dozen-or-so other root
> servers would then replicate it from the A root server using the
> standard DNS zone transfer protocol.  

…and this was eventually institutionalized to become the infamous RZMA, which continues to this day.  And which has, over the years, required the USG to expend a substantial amount of time and credibility shutting down conversations about it at intergovernmental meetings.

https://blog.verisign.com/security/root-zone-maintainer-service-agreement-renewal/

> After many years, many new competing TLDs were created, none of which has been particularly successful. 

This, really, is the only thing in John’s long post that I would take any issue with.  I think it presupposes that success is on the same terms as .COM: the aforementioned beltway bandits self-enriching at the expense of the Internet.  I don’t think that’s a useful definition of success.  Instead, using TLDs to remove the .COM or .NET zones from the DNSSEC validation chain is an _excellent_ measure of success in my estimation.  By that measure, there are a few of the last tranche that are succeeding, and there will be more in the next tranche.  Success can be measured in better security, rather than more dollars.

                                -Bill