[ih] Jon Postel's papers

[vinton cerf]

Inline comments

On Fri, Jul 18, 2025 at 4:45 PM John Gilmore via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> 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.)
>
SAIC was employee-owned until Robert Beyster, its founder, passed away.
I believe it then went public.

>
> President Clinton asked a friend who had no connection with the Internet
> community, Ira Magaziner, to investigate the situation and make a
> recommendation.

Ira had worked earlier with Hilary at Bill's request to try to re-engineer
the healthcare system. That did not work out.

> 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.
>
I had not heard this particular rendering before, John, but it makes sense.

>
> 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.
>
This story is entirely new to me - thanks for sharing it.

>
> 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
>
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