"If you're in charge of managing domain name space you should treat everybody who asks for a registration the same. Whatever that is - whether it's nice or ugly or whatever - just be fair, treat them all the same"
About this Quote
Postel is laying down an ethic of the early internet that sounds almost quaint now: power should behave like plumbing. Domain names feel like culture - brands, identity, status - but he insists they be treated as infrastructure. The line does a lot of work with simple words: "in charge" quietly admits there is a gatekeeper, while "treat everybody... the same" tries to strip that gatekeeper of discretion. It is a warning to the person holding the keys: your tastes ("nice or ugly") are not a policy.
The context matters. Postel wasn’t theorizing from the sidelines; he was one of the central stewards of internet coordination when the network was growing from research community to public utility. In that liminal moment, domain registration could easily become a soft form of censorship or favoritism, not through overt bans but through delays, extra scrutiny, or "reasonable" exceptions. His wording anticipates exactly those temptations: the temptation to judge the applicant, to judge the name, to judge the politics.
The subtext is a philosophy that later got formalized into norms like "rough consensus and running code": legitimacy comes from predictable process, not from the moral purity of outcomes. Postel’s fairness isn’t sentimental; it’s defensive engineering. A neutral registry reduces conflict, scales globally, and keeps the internet from inheriting the arbitrariness of older institutions. It’s also a quiet rebuke to the future, where domains would become battlegrounds for trademarks, nationalism, and platform control. He’s sketching a constitution in a sentence - and betting that boring, consistent rules are what keep a network free.
The context matters. Postel wasn’t theorizing from the sidelines; he was one of the central stewards of internet coordination when the network was growing from research community to public utility. In that liminal moment, domain registration could easily become a soft form of censorship or favoritism, not through overt bans but through delays, extra scrutiny, or "reasonable" exceptions. His wording anticipates exactly those temptations: the temptation to judge the applicant, to judge the name, to judge the politics.
The subtext is a philosophy that later got formalized into norms like "rough consensus and running code": legitimacy comes from predictable process, not from the moral purity of outcomes. Postel’s fairness isn’t sentimental; it’s defensive engineering. A neutral registry reduces conflict, scales globally, and keeps the internet from inheriting the arbitrariness of older institutions. It’s also a quiet rebuke to the future, where domains would become battlegrounds for trademarks, nationalism, and platform control. He’s sketching a constitution in a sentence - and betting that boring, consistent rules are what keep a network free.
Quote Details
| Topic | Internet |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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