Steve Crocker

“The initial RFCs were just informal notes, but they evolved into the primary mechanism for defining the Internet's standards.”

“We didn't have a grand plan. We were just a bunch of graduate students trying to get our machines to talk to each other.”

“Security was not an initial design consideration for the ARPANET because the community was small and trusted.”

“The Request for Comments was intended to be an extremely modest, informal, and open channel for communication.”

“The core of the internet is this notion of open architecture and interoperability.”

“The internet is a creature of the engineers, and it is governed by the engineers.”

“What was not foreseen was the scale, the commercialization, and the social impact.”

“The genius of the DNS is that it is a hierarchical, distributed database.”

“ICANN's role is stewardship, not ownership, of the domain name system.”

“The multistakeholder model is messy, but it's the only thing that works for a global, distributed system.”

“There was a sense of camaraderie and a shared goal that was very powerful.”