Jon Postel Founds the IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) Before the Internet

In 1972 during the years of the ARPANET that preceded the Internet the IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) was established informally as a reference to various technical functions for the ARPANET that computer scientists Jon Postel and Joyce K. Reynolds performed at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) and at the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute. Because of his comprehensive influence on the development of the Internet during his lifetime, as especially for his role as the sole member of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, Jon postel was known to Internet insiders as the "god ^2] of the Internet."

"On March 26, 1972, Vint Cerf and Jon Postel at UCLA called for establishing a socket number catalog in RFC 322. Network administrators were asked to submit a note or place a phone call, "describing the function and socket numbers of network service programs at each HOST".^[19] This catalog was subsequently published as RFC 433 in December 1972.^[20] In it Postel first proposed a registry of assignments of port numbers to network services, calling himself the czar of socket numbers.^[21]

"The first reference to the name "IANA" in the RFC series is in RFC 1083, published in December, 1988 by Postel at USC-ISI, referring to Joyce K. Reynolds as the IANA contact. However the function, and the term, was well established long before that; RFC 1174 says that "Throughout its entire history, the Internet system has employed a central Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA)..."^[22]

"In 1995, the National Science Foundation authorized Network Solutions to assess domain name registrants a $50 fee per year for the first two years, 30 percent of which was to be deposited in the Intellectual Infrastructure Fund (IIF), a fund to be used for the preservation and enhancement of the intellectual infrastructure of the Internet.^[23] There was widespread dissatisfaction with this concentration of power (and money) in one company, and people looked to IANA for a solution. Postel wrote up a draft^[24] on IANA and the creation of new top level domains. He was trying to institutionalize IANA. In retrospect, this would have been valuable, since he unexpectedly died about two years later.

"Jon Postel managed the IANA function from its inception on the ARPANET until his death in October 1998. By his almost 30 years of "selfless service",^[27] Postel created his de facto authority to manage key parts of the Internet infrastructure. After his death, Joyce K. Reynolds, who had worked with him for many years, managed the transition of the IANA function to ICANN.

"Starting in 1988, IANA was funded by the U.S. government under a contract between the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the Information Sciences Institute. This contract expired in April 1997, but was extended to preserve IANA.^[28]

"On December 24, 1998, USC entered into a transition agreement with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers ICANN, transferring the IANA project to ICANN, effective January 1, 1999, thus making IANA an operating unit of ICANN.^[29]

"In June 1999, at its Oslo meeting, IETF signed an agreement with ICANN concerning the tasks that IANA would perform for the IETF; this is published as RFC 2860.^[30]

"On February 8, 2000, the Department of Commerce entered into an agreement with ICANN for ICANN to perform the IANA functions" (Wikipedia article on Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, accessed 9-2020).