Master of Your Domain: Jon Postel

Jul 10 1998

Jon Postel is struggling with the door between two conference rooms at the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute in Marina Del Rey, Calif. The door seems to be blocked. "Oh, it must be those guys with their robots," says the director of the Institute's computer networks division, turning around to take the long route via the hallway.

Walking with a light, elf-like step past walls plastered with "Far Side" cartoons, Postel explains that some of the ISI researchers hold robot soccer tournaments in one of the conference rooms, and that they have to move the furniture against the wall to create a clear playing field - hence the jammed door.

Turns out there's no game in progress when we enter the room; two of the robots - looking like a combination of the Mars rover and a grasshopper - are resting on a table. Two bright orange soccer balls sit in a corner. In a rolling murmur, Postel explains that the balls are colored that way so the robots' computer vision system can find them.

From the twinkle in his eye, it's clear Postel enjoys talking about the soccer robots. And right now, the man The Economist and The Financial Post have called a "god" of the Internet probably needs all the laughs he can get.

Postel is the one-man organization in charge of assigning all the numbers that go with Internet domain names around the world. As creator of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority nearly 30 years ago, he's the guy who makes it possible for someone to type "microsoft.com" and be routed to the distinctly numbered computer on which that site sits.

He strikes fear in the heart of Network Solutions , whose ironclad monopoly on domain-registration started to rust away the day he proposed a plan to introduce more generic top-level domains in 1996. Last January, simply by asking a few people to comply, he was able to shunt a great deal of Internet address queries away from the main server at Network Solutions Inc. and send it instead to a server he oversees at ISI.

But now that the government has given the Internet community until Sept. 30 to create its own nonprofit corporation to manage the domain name process, the focus is on Postel. Because of his crucial role in the operation of the Internet, and his strong beliefs about who should be in charge of it, he's in the midst of a litigious and emotional debate to determine the future of the critical Domain Name System.

Earlier this month in Virginia, people of influence discussed the question of what to do about the Internet - and about Postel. The same questions will be asked again next week in Geneva.

But is he really the omnipotent antagonist to Internet progress that his business-oriented adversaries claim? Or merely a misunderstood man caught up in a tidal wave of change, trying to use his authority for the broader benefit of the Internet community?

In person, Postel looks less like God and more like Burl Ives posing as a member of ZZ Top. The only facial features that hark back to the Hebrew scriptures are his eyebrows, which arch and protrude like Charlton Heston's did in The Ten Commandments.

For all his notoriety, he doesn't seek the spotlight. Only after a volley of e-mail messages and phone calls did he respond to an interview request, sending a terse e-mail reply: "About how much time do you think this would take?"

For the better part of three decades, Postel has been able to do his job without any attention at all. In 1969, while a 25-year-old grad student at UCLA, Postel became a researcher for ARPANet, the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, which was funded by the Defense Department. He was put in charge of the Network Management center, conducting tests and analyzing the new computer-based communication system, which would evolve into the Internet.

As Postel describes it, the creation of IANA was straightforward. "At the start of the ARPANet, there was a need for someone to keep a simple list of a few numbers that were uniquely assigned to various uses in the ARPANet protocols. One thing led to another, and ... here we are," he says. He didn't bother to create a name for his work until 1988.

Postel is also low-key about his personal life. He chooses to meet with a reporter in a sparse conference room. Tell him that people are interested in learning what kind of person he is, and he smirks, "If we tell them, they won't be interested anymore."

Only by e-mail, and several days after the interview, do the details come out, in a lengthy note that is at once both academic curriculum vitae and primitive resume. You learn, for example, that he was born on August 6, 1943, in Altadena, Calif. You learn the name and location of every school he attended, from the Richardson D. White elementary school in Glendale, Calif., to the high school in Van Nuys to the bachelor's and master's degrees in engineering and the doctorate in computer science, all from UCLA. And you get a detailed chronology of every city he's lived in and every company he's worked for - but not what jobs he did.

His e-mail missive also gives his marital status: "single, no children."

Talk to Postel's friends, and they all portray him the same way. He and Vint Cerf, an Internet pioneer who is now an executive at MCI, went to high school together and then worked together at UCLA. "We were the Van Nuys mafia at UCLA," Cerf jokes. "Jon is quiet, but when he talks, people listen to what he has to say." Steve Crocker, who also went to high school with Postel and worked alongside him on ARPANet, describes him as "a calm personality, not a hothead, and not usually emotional."

Crocker, cofounder and CTO of CyberCash , remembers an incident in which he, Postel and a couple of other ARPANet researchers were sent to Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma City in the early 1970s to discuss the possibility of upgrading the Air Force's antiquated communications system. Before they were allowed to board the plane, Postel was ordered to wear shoes. Once they landed at the base, they were escorted to the officers club for lunch. Again, the dress code was a problem. "The question was not, 'Were they going to let us in?' but, 'For which reason weren't they going to let us in?'" Crocker says. The scruffy, hirsute researchers from UCLA had to eat instead at the noncommissioned officers club, where the rules were less strict.

With each passing year, IANA's database grew - and so did Postel's reputation in the Internet's inner sanctum. In addition to managing IANA and working for USC, where he researches high-speed networking and routing controls, he took on the job of editing the Requests for Comments , a series of documents that basically constitute the working papers of the Internet. He's been doing that job for the past 25 years, and has earned an unusual amount of respect.

"Quite frankly, to a significant number of people, Jon is really the gold standard," says White House Internet czar Ira Magaziner. "He's the guy they trust."

That's why it was so easy for Postel to conduct his controversial rerouting experiment. He simply sent e-mail to six administrators around the world who run secondary name servers, asking them to start getting their data from the server he operates at ISI instead of the one at Network Solutions. They did as they were told. Gerry Sneeringer, who manages the name server at the University of Maryland at College Park, told The Washington Post, "If Jon asks us to point somewhere else, we'll do it. He is the authority here."

Ask Network Solutions about Postel, however, and you get a very different picture. To the Virginia-based domain name registry, Postel might as well be a bolt-throwing Zeus straight out of Clash of the Titans.

A little more than two years ago, Postel proposed the creation of up to 50 new entities to register domain names - a process that had been the sole province of Network Solutions. A month later, he presented a revised version of the proposal to the Internet Society, a 6,000-member organization that deals with Internet standards, education and policy. ISOC passed the proposal and gave him the go-ahead to work on a business plan for what was being called "the new IANA."

Almost immediately, upstart companies announced the formation of their own registries, offering domains such as .web and .xxx. And NSI found its juicy exclusive dominion over the valuable .com domain slipping away. Its government contract expires Sept. 30.

"Maybe it's because of his demeanor, maybe it's because of the unbelievable circumstance that he found himself in - having this policy responsibility when the Net blossomed - that he's become kind of a cult figure," muses Donald Telage, senior VP of Internet affairs at Network Solutions. "As long as he doesn't believe it, and it doesn't go to his head, it's OK. What concerns a lot of people in the community is that [if] people tell you you're God a lot, you begin to believe it yourself."

For NSI, Postel's authority-based-on-reputation is a warning signal that the Internet's infrastructure is dangerously built on loose affiliations between researchers and academics. "In the old days it was OK to have a small group of people make policy decisions for the Net," says Telage. "What they used to call rough consensus used to involve a few hundred people [communicating] by e-mail, but you can't do that with a hundred million people. It's not appropriate for a single individual a la Dr. Postel to make those policy decisions."

NSI argues that the current ad hoc system is a doomsday scenario for the thousands of Net-based businesses that want decisions about operating protocols to be made by an organization with clear accountability, authority and responsibility.

Postel says he agrees with Telage's opinion that the Internet has gotten too big to depend on a one-man IANA, but he isn't keen on handing the reins over to NSI or a consortium of profit-minded domain name upstarts.

The ongoing discussions about who should control domain name registration, he says, are being conducted by three different groups: "People who want to add domains to make money, people who are already making money who don't want anything to change," and those who "just want the outcome to be as fair as possible." Reading the motto at www.iana.org, it's not hard to guess which camp Postel thinks he's in: "Dedicated to preserving the central coordinating functions of the global Internet for the public good."

It's clear that whatever happens to domain names, it will somehow involve Postel. In its June 5 White Paper on the domain name problem, the U.S. Department of Commerce reiterated its position that it would turn the role of assigning and maintaining Internet addresses over to a privately owned, nonprofit corporation. A lot of people think that corporation will be IANA.

Postel demurs - to a point. "I'm not on any power trip here," he says. "I don't expect to be on the board of directors or the chief executive [of the new IANA]. If they want to keep me on as a technical guy, great, but I don't expect to be in charge."

But Postel isn't relinquishing the authority he currently commands until certain conditions are met. That way, even though he may not be actually running it, the new IANA will be run the way he wants. "The decisions have to be made fairly and with the long-term benefit of the Internet community in mind," says Postel. "It may be too tempting for a private company to be influenced to make decisions that provide it with short-term profits, instead."

For all the attention Postel gets for being at the center of the storm, he says he's looking forward to getting back to his work as a researcher, and spending time on hobbies like hiking, backpacking and reading British detective stories.

"I'm often painted as secretly controlling the Internet and that that's all I do, but I'm really much more active in the research side of things. My IANA job is not the main part of my life," Postel insists.

Nevertheless, he's not about to allow the domain issue to get solved without him. "There's a lot of work to do still," he says. "It could come together in a couple of months or it could take a lot longer if some people decide to hold out for a specific advantage."

Like what? His voice carries a trace of cynicism: "Most of the people in the discussion are asking, 'How can I make a buck out of it?'"

Elizabeth Wasserman contributed to this story.