Head Of Internet Domain-Names Group Dies

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October 19, 1998 (6:07 AM EDT)

By Christine Casatelli,

Jon Postel, who played a pivotal role in administering the Internet, died Friday, The New York Times reported.

Postel, 55, died of complications after undergoing heart surgery in St. John's Hospital in Santa Monica, Calif.

A Los Angeles native, he worked as a computer scientist at the Information Sciences Institute, a branch of the University of Southern California in Marina del Rey, Calif.

Postel was widely viewed as the single most influential voice in Internet domain-name issues. While a graduate student at the University of California at Los Angeles, he was one of a small group of computer scientists who created the Arpanet, the precursor to the Internet.

For 30 years, Postel handled the administrative end of Internet addresses as part of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, a project that contracts with the U.S. government to coordinate top-level domain-name assignments and manage the distribution of numericInternet IP addresses.

From that position, he held more direct control over the Internet's infrastructure and address system than any other individual. His organization put out a series of proposed drafts for the creation of the Internet's new governing body.

In 1995, he helped kick off the debate over new domain names, advocating adding new top-level domains to the existing list of .com, .org, .net, and .edu. His efforts helped lead to a Geneva-based group, sponsored by the Internet Society, which proposed its own vision of domain-system privatization.

Postel's actions also proved controversial at times. In early February, he temporarily rerouted Web traffic away from the Internet's primary address server in Virginia, saying he was testing the system's flexibility. Critics accused him of staging a protest against the U.S. government's plans to change his organization's function.