Science Quote by Jon Postel

The line lands with the deceptively simple confidence of an engineer who knows where the real bottlenecks live. Jon Postel isn’t dreaming about “the web” as some mystical frontier; he’s naming an infrastructural minimum. Ten megabits is a policy disguised as a technical benchmark: make bandwidth abundant enough that ordinary people stop rationing their curiosity. When speed is scarce, the network becomes a hierarchy of privilege and patience. When speed is cheap, the web stops feeling like a series of toll booths and starts behaving like a public square.

The subtext is classic Postel-era Internet thinking: end-to-end optimism. Give users a fat enough pipe and innovation happens at the edges, not by permission from a gatekeeper. It’s also a quiet rebuke to the idea that the web’s shortcomings are mainly cultural or moral. A lot of “bad” online experience is just a latency tax: pages that won’t load, media that stutters, conversations that fragment. Postel suggests that a significant slice of what we call “the web” is actually the felt experience of network constraints.

Context matters: Postel helped shape the protocols that made the Internet interoperable. His world prized rough consensus and running code, but it also relied on a belief that connectivity would keep improving for everyone. “Everyone should have ten megabits” reads today as both quaint (numbers inflated) and sharp: the argument still holds. The web becomes “wonderful” not through grand visions, but through boring, equitable capacity.