Science & Tech Quote by Jon Postel

Postel is quietly eulogizing a lost innocence in how the internet gets made. In one clean before-and-after, he sketches a power shift: from university rooms where standards were a nerdy public good, to corporate meetings where standards are competitive terrain. The sentence sounds observational, almost bland, but the subtext is a warning: the center of gravity has moved, and with it the definition of what counts as "good."

The pivot word is "care". Universities cared, too, but in a different register: coherence, openness, interoperability, elegance. Companies "care what the standards turn out to be" because standards harden into markets. A protocol decision can bless a business model, throttle a rival, or lock users into an ecosystem. Postel is pointing at the moment the internet stops being a research network with commercial visitors and becomes commercial infrastructure with research as a tenant.

Context matters: Postel helped steward the internet's naming and numbering guts, and he lived through the 1990s commercialization wave, when the IETF mantra of "rough consensus and running code" collided with product timelines, branding wars, and lawyers. His tone isn't anti-industry so much as institutional realist. When the room fills with people who have quarterly targets, "consensus" starts to mean "who can show up the most, argue the longest, or ship the de facto standard first."

The line lands because it's not nostalgia; it's governance critique disguised as sociology. He’s telling you where the internet’s constitution is being rewritten: not in grand speeches, but in who gets a chair.