Science Quote by Jon Postel

In the internet’s origin story, “fair” is a more radical word than it sounds. Jon Postel wasn’t offering a Hallmark principle; he was sketching a governance model for a network that would outgrow any single lab, company, or country. As an early steward of core protocols and the domain name system, Postel sat in the awkward seat where technical decisions became social power. “Run a domain” is bureaucratic language for something closer to sovereignty: you decide what exists, what resolves, who gets a name, and who gets shut out. In that light, “overriding rule” reads less like etiquette and more like a warning label.

The line works because it reframes authority as legitimacy. Postel doesn’t say “be right” or “be efficient.” He doesn’t even say “be secure.” He says “be fair,” implying that the stability of a naming system depends on perceived procedural justice as much as on uptime. Domains are trust machines; they function when everyone believes the referee isn’t playing for a team.

There’s also a quiet, engineer’s realism in the phrasing: “if you want to run” suggests fairness isn’t just moral, it’s pragmatic. Unfair administrators invite workarounds, fragmentation, and rival roots - the internet’s version of secession.

Contextually, this echoes the culture of early internet governance: small, personality-driven, and surprisingly norm-based. Before formal multi-stakeholder processes, credibility was the currency. Postel’s maxim is a blueprint for why that fragile arrangement held: not because power was absent, but because it was restrained, publicly, by a simple standard that users could recognize and enforce.