[ih] Jon Postel's papers

[Brian E Carpenter]

+1 to a halo for Jorge Contreras.

Regards
    Brian Carpenter

On 20-Jul-25 15:17, Karl Auerbach wrote:
> (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
>>>