Science & Tech Quote by Jon Postel

There is a quiet audacity in how casually Postel drops the word "also". It reads like a modest footnote, yet it smuggles in one of the most consequential facts about the modern world: for a long stretch of the Internet's formative years, a single human being effectively stewarded the plumbing that makes the whole system cohere. The intent is administrative clarity, almost bureaucratic in its dryness. The effect is something closer to a power reveal.

Postel’s phrasing frames the Internet not as a corporate product or a nation-state project, but as an engineered commons that still requires coordination. He names the three levers that matter - address space, domain names, protocol conventions - and in doing so, he sketches the Internet’s paradox: radically decentralized at the edges, tightly standardized at the core. The subtext is that trust, not just code, is a foundational protocol. Someone has to decide what counts as a valid name, a legitimate number, a shared rule.

Context sharpens the line. In the pre-ICANN era, IANA functioned less like a government agency and more like a widely respected caretaker operating on legitimacy earned through competence and community consent. Postel’s restraint signals that legitimacy: he doesn’t grandstand about authority; he normalizes it as service. That’s why the quote works. It’s a reminder that today’s seemingly inevitable, planet-scale connectivity began as a fragile social arrangement held together by technical rigor, personal credibility, and a surprisingly small circle of people willing to do unglamorous work correctly.