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Comment by VictorPath | Hacker News Reader

In thanks for his decades of work getting the Internet going, Postel spent the months before he died getting trashed by anonymous government officials in the Washington Post and elsewhere.

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Why was that?

There was a huge controversy over governance of the Internet, in particular the DNS, because it had become clear that Network Solutions had been handed a licence to print money as the monopoly controller of the DNS, and they were providing very poor service (filling in forms over email, very slow response times, $100 fees) and inconsistent enforcement of decency rules.

Part of the response was the IAHC which came up with the template for the fix: break up the monopoly by splitting registries and registrars, force Network Solutions to relinquish some of its TLDs, and create more TLDs.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAHC

This was not immediately successful, until Postel (as IANA) instructed the root DNS operators (other than Network Solutions) to get the root zone from IANA instead of from NetSol. This caused an epic shitfest, as a result of which Postel reverted the root zone change, and the US NTIA got moving and started the foundation of ICANN.

The company now known as Verisign is the direct successor of NetSol, and they still control .com and .net, and feed the root zone to the other root server operators.

Does anyone else remember when Verisign ran that sketchy ringtone company (Think crazy frog, schnuffel bunny, etc)? [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamba!

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