[ih] Jon Postel's papers

[touch at strayalpha.com]

Notes below…

> On Jul 18, 2025, at 1:45 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.

If such info exists, it is part of the USC archive of his office effects, and key portions of it with potential legal content would be USC confidential and not subject to public disclosure.

> Network Solutions (NSI) had been running the DNS zones for years under a
> sole-source government contract, ...
> 
> President Clinton asked a friend who had no connection with the Internet
> community, Ira Magaziner, to investigate the situation and make a
> recommendation.  …
...
> 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.  ….  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.

I recall some of this a little differently. I recall there being some claim that it would be difficult to move the root zones. I don’t know who made that claim.

> 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.  ...

> ...  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. ...

I have a very different recollection, as above.

My recollection is that this step was intended to prove how *easy* it would be to move the root zones, thus that no single organization should assert control over the root zones simply because of the inertia and effort required to change them.

Others reported this as a “power play” of his asserting authority, but my recollection is that it was intended to prove that shifting the root servers was both simple and a matter of trust - if you trusted the person who told you to move it, it could move easily.

> ... 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 view it as he discussed it with me - as a way to prove that the role was mutable.

> ...
> 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.

As per my other post, not likely, AFAIK. Or, more to the point, maybe after everyone on this list with such a viewpoint releases their entire email archive for such. (i.e., you all first…)

Joe