Science & Tech Quote by Jon Postel

Postel’s line lands with the quiet audacity of someone describing a revolution as if it were a technical preference. “Almost unanimity” reads like understatement, but it’s doing real rhetorical work: it frames nongovernment control not as an ideological demand, but as the default consensus of the people actually building the network. The word “managed” is the tell. Postel isn’t arguing against laws or politics in the abstract; he’s drawing a boundary around operational authority - the naming, numbering, and protocol decisions that make the Internet cohere. In the 1990s, when the network was tipping from academic infrastructure into global commerce, that boundary was suddenly worth fighting over.

The subtext is a distrust of sovereignty as a networking principle. National control implies fragmentation, speech controls, and incompatible standards. Multinational control implies bureaucracy, slow-moving committees, and power bargaining dressed up as legitimacy. Postel’s alternative, implied rather than shouted, is governance by rough consensus and running code: legitimacy earned through functionality, adoption, and a kind of engineer’s pragmatism. It’s an anti-imperial stance expressed as systems design.

Context matters because Postel wasn’t a pundit; he was central to the Internet’s plumbing (IANA) and had to keep it working while governments and corporations began to notice what was at stake. The quote is both a norm-setting move and a warning flare: if states “manage” the Internet, they won’t merely regulate it - they’ll reterritorialize it. And once that happens, the network stops being a network and starts becoming a set of borders.