Jon Postel Quotes
But as soon as we got that higher speed access to the home there's going to be a tremendous crunch on the backbones for a much higher speed bandwidth. People really ought to be planning for that.
Postel, Jon. Interview. Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California, 1998.
This is a classic attempt to argue against a technical proposed policy that the Senator did not understand. While most of the new digital companies favored net neutrality, the telephone companies opposed it as they wanted to be able to discriminate among customers in providing Internet access. One of the telephone companies had obtained Steven’s support for the anti Net Neutrality position. They must have explained some technical reasons to him, and this speech was his understanding of the concept. To those who know something technical about the Internet and digital transmission, this is so crude and wrong that it is humorous.
Jonathan Bruce Postel was an American computer scientist who made many significant contributions to the development of the Internet, particularly with respect to standards. He is known principally for being the Editor of the Request for Comment (RFC) document series, for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), and for administering the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) until his death. In his lifetime he was known as the "god of the Internet" for his comprehensive influence on the medium, although Postel himself noted that this "compliment" came with a barb — with the article that introduced it also suggesting that he should be replaced by a "Professional."
