[ih] Jon Postel's papers

[Brian E Carpenter]

One gloss on John's story is that Magaziner did do what he probably
thought was due diligence by talking to a lot of people. As it happened,
the IETF met in D.C. in December 1997, and Magaziner invited a number
of people to see him in his office in the Old Executive Office Building,
certainly including Jon. I (as IAB Chair) and Fred Baker (as IETF Chair)
visited Magaziner together.

I wrote my version of the story on pages 119-122 of my book [1].
That's a bit too much to post here in violation of Springer's
copyright rules, but here are some short quotes:

"Fresh from failing to reform American health care with Hillary Clinton,
Ira Magaziner was taken on by Bill Clinton and Al Gore to reform the
Internet. Put more diplomatically, he was supposed to create policy to
enable electronic commerce... Various departments of the US Administration
appeared to believe that only the USA could be trusted with stewardship of
the Internet, or, less diplomatically, that it should be treated as an arm
of US foreign, trade, military or intelligence policy... Magaziner more or
less cleared his calendar for a sequence of such meetings with IETF and
ISOC people. I kept no detailed notes, but we must certainly have spoken
in favour of a community-based and international approach to Internet
registry management."

Of course, he ignored us.

[1] https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4471-5025-1

Regards
    Brian Carpenter

On 19-Jul-25 08:45, John Gilmore via Internet-history wrote:
> John Kristoff via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>>                                                    I'd be curious what
>> timelines, milestones, events, etc. you'd be particularly interested in
>> for the most important Internet history insights.
> 
> I'd be interested in Jon's records around the replication of the root zone
> files, and the transition of IANA functions to a non-governmental party.
> 
> Network Solutions (NSI) had been running the DNS zones for years under a
> sole-source government contract, doing the minimal work required to
> register domain names.  It got the job because it had a minority owner,
> and that provided priority in government contracting.  NSI was bought in
> 1995 by beltway bandit SAIC for $4.7M.  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.
> (SAIC later took NSI public for $54M of investor dollars, without
> diluting its control over NSI, and immediately handed a large chunk of
> those dollars back to itself scot-free.  Then it sold the whole thing
> for billions, during the tech bubble.  SAIC is a company without outside
> shareholders -- it is "employee-owned" -- so there are no outside
> parties nor investors with authority nor influence over what corrupt
> things the employees decide to do.)
> 
> President Clinton asked a friend who had no connection with the Internet
> community, Ira Magaziner, to investigate the situation and make a
> recommendation.  Ira went around and interviewed lots of people
> involved, but was mum about what he might eventually recommend.
> Magaziner had no actual authority, but he had the ear of the President,
> so many people deferred to him.  (It wasn't clear whether the US
> President had any authority over the Internet either, but this was still
> at the stage when key parts of the infrastructure were being funded by
> the US government -- including IANA.)
> 
> I was part of the CORE (Council of Registrars) effort to start up some
> legitimate new competing TLD's.  This effort was catalyzed by the
> nonprofit Internet Society, and Jon Postel and I were both board members
> there.  Jon was also collaborating in his IANA role.  Jon had the
> authority as the IANA, to add new TLD names to the root zone.  But he
> had no backing against attacks by a billion-dollar beltway bandit with a
> monopoly; he was just an academic with a small government contract.  So
> ISOC and CORE agreed to fund legal assistance and indemnification for
> IANA in return for IANA adding the new domain names that CORE needed.
> There were some serious questions about whether NSI/SAIC would quietly
> allow their monopoly to expire -- even though they would retain the
> lucrative .COM.  We thought it more likely that they would file a bogus
> lawsuit to drag out and muddle the process in the hope of permanently
> disrupting it.  At the time, I was also on the EFF.org board and knew
> lots of good lawyers.
> 
> CORE incorporated as a nonprofit trade association, signed up almost a
> hundred registrars, and raised tens of thousands of dollars in initial
> joining fees from each of them.  It used that money to subcontract with
> Emergent Corp. to build the central registry hardware and software that
> would operate the seven new TLDs if and when they were established.  It
> defined protocols and wrote client software for registrars to interact
> with the registry, and got it all working in a San Francisco data
> center, manned 24 hours a day by trained operators.  CORE had a dozen
> registrars successfully doing test transactions with the central
> registry.  But we couldn't go into real operation without those new TLDs
> getting into the domain name systems' root zone.
> 
> 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.  These root servers were operated
> by well connected volunteers all over the globe.  Jon was (reasonably)
> concerned that if he added seven competing TLDs to the root zone, then a
> corrupt NSI would refuse to accept the update at the "A" root server,
> and the TLDs would remain unusable, despite his authority to define the
> contents of the root zone, and despite NSI having no authority to define
> its contents.
> 
> So Jon started asking root server operators to change their DNS
> configuration so that they would replicate the root zone directly from
> IANA's root server, rather than from NSI's root server.  This would
> have, and did have, no effect on Internet domain queries, since IANA's
> server was always serving up the same data as NSI's server.  Jon started
> by asking the most likely candidates, and had successfully converted
> more than half of the root servers to direct replication from IANA.
> When he asked the next root server (I think it was the one run by the
> Army), they told NSI about the request.  NSI escalated the issue to SAIC
> and to Ira Magaziner.  On 1998-01-30 or so, there was a fractious phone
> call from Ira Magaziner to Jon Postel and some USC-ISI lawyers.
> Magaziner basically told Jon "Put those back or you'll never work on the
> Internet again".  Despite the unlikely idea that newbie policy wonk
> Magaziner could have anything to do with whether Internet co-inventor
> Jon Postel could ever work on the Internet in the future, Jon
> unfortunately agreed to do so, rather than asserting his authority as
> the IANA to run the root zone as he determined best.  Someone leaked
> this incident to the press, with a spin that Jon was "destabilizing the
> Internet" rather than that Jon was cutting out the inadvertent control
> of a company with an interest in monopolizing the Internet for its own
> profit.
> 
> Two weeks later, on 1998-02-15, CORE's data center operator had departed
> at 15:45 before their replacement operator had arrived (the new operator
> was ill and only arrived at 19:00).  Meanwhile, the data center was
> broken into by thieves, the chain-link fencing around the servers was
> cut, and two entire Sun Enterprise 450 servers, worth about $70,000,
> were stolen.  Nothing else in the whole multi-tenant data center was
> stolen.  This was obviously a targeted theft, and who could have wanted
> to target CORE except SAIC?  The theft was investigated by the police,
> but was never resolved.  CORE's contractor had good offsite backups and
> the equipment was insured.  They installed a second pair of Sun servers
> overnight, and were back to full operation within 29 hours.  Even if
> they had been running operational TLDs, the TLDs would have continued
> functioning just fine.  But for one day, the people who owned those TLDs
> would have been unable to make changes in them.
> 
> Ultimately, Magaziner's "Green Paper" and "White Paper" proposals backed
> NSI's monopoly, which continues to this day over .com, by far the most
> popular and lucrative top-level domain.  The CORE registrars became
> resellers of NSI's service, and CORE dissolved as a back-end registry.
> Jon Postel died of a leaking heart valve later that year, which left a
> void that the corrupt, bloated and self-serving ICANN (which was created
> based on Magaziner's model) was happy to fill.  A few of the smaller
> TLDs were hived off to other orgs (one of which went to ISOC, where top
> employees later tried to buy it for a borrowed billion dollars, making
> the money back by vastly increasing the price of renewals for every
> nonprofit on the Internet).  After many years, many new competing TLDs
> were created, none of which has been particularly successful.  In short,
> the fix was in, and the beltway bandits won.  NSI is still charging
> premium prices (in the $15 range) for each year of back-end .com domain
> registration that costs them less than a penny a year to provide.
> 
> There's a bit more background on this in an interview with me by Salon
> from 2002:
> 
>    https://web.archive.org/web/20120109194541/http://www.salon.com/2002/07/02/gilmore_2/
> 
> I repeat, it would be interesting to see Jon's papers and records about
> that time.  Most of them would probably be emails, and there would
> be thousands or tens of thousands of them.
> 
> 	John
>