Science Quote by Jon Postel

Under the dry casing of network engineering, Postel is sketching a political philosophy for the internet: not utopia, not chaos, but managed fairness enforced by dumb, obedient machines. He’s describing routers as arbiters that can recognize a shared resource and intentionally carve it up: some capacity guaranteed, some left to the scrum of whoever shows up first. It’s a vision of the network as a negotiated commons, where “first come first served” is tolerated only after baseline obligations are met.

The phrasing matters. “Get involved” quietly rejects the fantasy that infrastructure is neutral. Routers aren’t just forwarding packets; they’re participating in social decisions translated into policy tables. “Reserved” signals priority, entitlement, the existence of classes of traffic that deserve protection from the mob. Postel isn’t sentimental about equality; he’s pragmatic about consequences. Without reservation, time-sensitive services collapse into jitter and loss. With too much reservation, the open internet curdles into a set of toll lanes.

The subtext is a warning and a reassurance at once: quality of service is possible, but it requires consent about what gets protected and why. Coming from Postel, one of the internet’s chief stewards, the context is late-stage scaling anxiety: the network is growing up, and the “best effort” ethos can’t handle every promise people want to staple onto it. He’s normalizing governance at the protocol level, before governance arrives via lawyers and monopolies.