[ih] Governments' Bureaucracy and The Internet

[Steve Crocker]

I can't speak about the role of the bureaucracy in creating the Internet.
I saw a tiny bit of the bureaucracy during the creation of the Arpanet.

Two particularly relevant pieces of the bureaucracy related to the
procurement of the 50 kilobit per second leased lines.  On the positive
side, the government had access to a special price, I believe that made it
possible use the lines instead of much slower lines and stay within the
available budget.

On the other hand, the rules for ordering the lines included a nine month
lead time.  That made it very hard to adjust to the occasional issues that
arose requiring replanning the topology.

Steve


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On Sat, Nov 7, 2026 at 4:35 PM Jack Haverty <jack at 3kitty.org> wrote:

> This list reminds me a lot of the Internet Meetings more than 40 years ago
> -- whatever the current topic was, it was easy to go off on tangents that
> could only be corrected by activation of the Rathole Protocol  (search the
> archives of this list).
>
> I changed the subject of this message to reflect the current distraction.
>
> In the BBN world, someone started putting a serial number in the Title of
> the report, e.g., "Quarterly Technical Report #23".  That made it easier to
> track the QTRs, since the Title was also on the cover page.   I just
> continued the practice and don't know who started it.   Probably some
> experienced old guy.
>
> The lesson I learned was that it was far easier to work around a
> bureaucratic rule than to try to change it.
>
> At BBN we built hardware for the government.  The contract boilerplate was
> often huge, containing all sorts of rules as dictated by laws.   I recall
> one required the contractor (us) to procure all ball bearings used in the
> design from a particular company in some US state.   Fortunately there is
> little use for ball bearings in computer equipment.   But I've always
> wondered about the History of that rule and law that required it.  Some
> legislator somewhere got something for his or her insistence on including
> that requirement in passing the law that led to the procurement regulation
> in the boilerplate.
>
> But the bureaucratic history is also an important, and likely influential,
> part of Internet History.  Did bureaucracy help establish The Internet, or
> hinder it?    There were other governments involved, not just the US.  What
> kinds of such issues were there in Europe or elsewhere as the Internet grew?
>
> /Jack Haverty
>
> On 11/7/26 11:45, Steve Crocker wrote:
>
> :) I had my own encounters with government bureaucracy.  One day I went to
> the file and pulled a few years' worth of QTRs.  Each one had a cover sheet
> -- not the DD-54, but a cover sheet resembling a title page.  The cover
> sheet contained all sorts of information.  Contract number, contractor
> name, contract dates, total contract amount, title of the work, etc.
> However, none of this information indicated the report date or
> sequence number or anything that changed from one report to the next.  Nor
> did the content of each report help very much ;)
>
> Upon investigation, I discovered the contract contained explicit language
> dictating the cover page content of each QTR, and the QTRs were in complete
> conformance.
>
> I called the ARPA Program Management Office, our interface to the
> contracting offices, and suggested they fix this.  Nothing happened.  Some
> time later, I called them again.  Nothing happened.  Yet later, completely
> exasperated, I wrote a memo explaining the issue once again and mentioned
> that I had already reported it twice before.  This triggered a desperate
> search for my previous two complaints.  Since my previous two complaints
> were verbal, there was no record.
>
> And in an entirely different setting, I once had a professor call me
> asking for relief from a contract constraint.  He had written a lengthy
> report on their AI research and discovered an explicit formula in the
> contract limiting the total number of pages to 25,000 (i.e., number of
> pages x number of copies ≤ 25,000).  He wanted to print more copies.  I
> thought it was a good idea since reporting on AI research was skimpy in
> those days and I thought it would help the cause.  His contract was part of
> my budget, but I was only the COTR.  Relief from a contract requirement
> could come only from the Contracting Officer.  I called the Contracting
> Officer.  He was a really old guy, maybe 50 years old.  I was in my
> twenties.  I explained the issue.  He said no.  I explained it again and
> said it would be helpful.  He said no.  I got a little agitated and
> inappropriately suggested we could move the next contract renewal to
> another Contracting Office.  He said we could do whatever we wanted, but
> that constraint was a statute.  A statute!  Not an OMB circular, not a FAR
> regulation, not an Agency directive?  There's a whole parfait of
> regulations and rules.  Statutes are at the base.  That means Congress
> passed a law.
>
> He waited a couple of beats, either out of patience with my youth or
> enjoying the moment.  "Reports bigger than that have to be sent to the
> Government Printing Office."  The light dawns.  I can fill in the rest.
> And farmed out to various bidders.  I thanked him for his time, ended the
> call, and reorganized.  I wasn't about to give up.  I could have asked
> someone else in the office or figured it out myself.  Instead, I decided to
> ask someone else who might have faced this problem.  I estimated the
> university was roughly at the B+ level of sophistication in dealing with
> government bureaucracy.  I called a friend at the Rand Corporation.  Rand
> had fifty years of experience dealing with the U.S. government.  Almost
> certainly at the A+ level.
>
> My friend listened briefly and responded, "You mean it's a report with
> appendices and is in multiple volumes and perhaps has been through a couple
> of versions?"  "Why, yes," I said, "that's exactly what he has."
>
> I called the professor back, explained about appendices and volumes, then
> sat back in my chair feeling very good about my service to the community
> and to the people and government of the United States.
>
> Many years later when I shared this episode with a one of the program
> managers who had the same job, he cut me off quickly and said simply cut it
> into multiple pieces.  But he was quite a bit older than I had been.
> Experience counts.
>
> Steve
>
>
>
>
> On Sat, Nov 7, 2026 at 2:10 PM Jack Haverty via Internet-history <
> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>
>> Steve - your mention of late quarterly reports reminded me of my first
>> encounter with government bureaucracy.
>>
>> Sometime in the late 1970s, I was PI on some ARPA contract with BBN.
>>   Our Finance guy accosted me one day to say that the government was
>> refusing to pay a bill because we had not yet submitted our Quarterly
>> Technical Report, aka QTR.  I clearly remembered submitting that report,
>> on time, after a struggle internally to get everybody involved to write
>> their piece.  After some investigation, the ARPA PM (may have been Vint)
>> confirmed that ARPA had received the QTR.  But the government still
>> refused to pay the bill.
>>
>> With more investigation, we discovered that all Deliverables had to be
>> accompanied by a government form (a "DD-54" IIRC).   The form for our
>> QTR had either been forgotten by the BBN bureaucracy or lost in its
>> travels through the government bureaucracy.  No DD-54, no Deliverable
>> received.  The actual QTR didn't really matter.  Without the DD-54, the
>> government withheld payment, but no one seemed able to explain why.
>>
>> That was my first lesson in how to deal with government bureaucracy -
>> just do what the system requires.  I didn't know Jon had worked on the
>> Keydata system (if it was actually in use yet at ARPA), or I might have
>> called him up and reported a Bug.   I suspect he would have told me it's
>> a Feature.
>>
>> /Jack Haverty
>>
>> On 11/7/26 06:15, Steve Crocker via Internet-history wrote:
>> > Lyman,
>> >
>> > Thanks!  I was about to send a follow up note re Keydata.
>> >
>> > The PDP-15 was for a data management system inside DARPA.  It held
>> copies
>> > of the contracts and management reports.  The system was a one-off
>> system
>> > developed by Keydata under contract through our office (IPTO).  It was
>> an
>> > interactive, time-shared system, and the agency director, Steve Lukasik,
>> > had direct access to it.
>> >
>> > Prior to the creation of that system, all of the tracking of contract
>> > status, expenditures, etc were done through a DoD system at Cameron
>> > Station, somewhere near the Pentagon.  Paper reports arrived monthly.
>> In
>> > addition to changing the timeliness of reports, it also disrupted the
>> flow
>> > of control.  One day I got a call from the director asking why
>> contractor X
>> > hadn't submitted any quarterly reports in the last few years.  Prior to
>> the
>> > creation of the Keydata system, if the director had been interested in
>> past
>> > quarterly reports, he would have asked someone.  In the process of
>> asking,
>> > we would have become aware of the situation and we would likely have
>> > reached out to the contractor with an urgent request/demand for updates.
>> >
>> > We had a TIP in the agency, so connecting the PDP-15 as a host was a
>> > natural step.  And Jon was just the right person to help Keydata add
>> > support for NCP and Telnet to the Keydata operating system.
>> >
>> > Steve
>> >
>> >
>> > Sent by a Verified
>> >
>> > sender
>> >
>> > On Sat, Nov 7, 2026 at 8:46 AM Lyman Chapin via Internet-history <
>> > internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>> >
>> >> A quick search shows that the CV is also online at
>> >>
>> https://www.postel.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/32/2023/07/postel-cv-1997.txt
>> >>
>> >> - Lyman
>> >>
>> >>> On Nov 7, 2026, at 8:08 AM, vinton cerf via Internet-history <
>> >> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>> >>> Can any of you help to recreate Jon Postel's work history?
>> >>>
>> >>> UCLA - 1967(?) - 1972 (?)
>> >>> SRI XXXX-XXXX
>> >>> <unknown>
>> >>> USC-ISI XXXX - 1998
>> >>>
>> >>> thanks
>> >>>
>> >>> vint
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