[ih] Jon Postel's papers

[Karl Auerbach]

(Again, this may be a duplicate as I posted it first on from my personal 
email, which this list doesn't seem to like.)

Jon was indeed aiming high and with the best of motives and ethical values.

However, Jon was not skilled in the arts of law and corporate 
structure.  Relatively few people are.

I was working with (or it often seemed, against) Jon's lawyer as these 
series of drafts came out.

My lawyer neurons did not like what I was reading.  (I've set up or run 
multiple corporations so I kinda had a sense for where the land mines 
were.  Legal stuff can be like that - words that are simple and obvious 
to a common sense layman's ears can often be great beasts of burden, 
overloaded with all kinds of implications, when used in a legal context.)

Through a kind of accident a small group of techies and lawyers (mostly 
academics) gathered in Boston to create a revised version in which we 
tried to remove or defuse some of those land mines. We became known as 
the Boston Working Group.  We submitted a revised version of that fifth 
draft and we participated in many conversations with NTIA and the US 
Dep't of Commerce.

(Our initial meeting was hosted by Jorge Contreras, a person who, 
although not well known deserves a halo as one of the Internet's lesser 
saints.)

Our initial materials are still online at the URL below. (We continued 
as a cohesive and active group for a couple of decades after that.)

https://cavebear.com/archive/bwg/

(There were several people who though of our group as a kind of secret 
society. We did keep our conversations largely unidentified - Chatham 
House rules and that sort of thing.)

         --karl--

> On 7/19/25 4:41 PM, Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history wrote:
>> On 20-Jul-25 05:40, touch--- via Internet-history wrote:
>>
>>> 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.
>>
>> Exactly what I remember. And Jon, while he had firm opinions and took 
>> his responsibility as IANA very seriously, was not the man to make 
>> power plays.  He cared about the Internet, not about his position or 
>> reputation.
>>
>> At the end, Jon was trying to make ICANN's bylaws as good as they 
>> could be. The very last email I saw from Jon, dated 28 September 
>> 1998, was titled "New IANA Bylaws -- the fifth version". He died two 
>> weeks later.
>>
>>    Brian
>>