1995: nobody had heard of domain names. It was so boring even geeks had to have it explained to them how it actually works. Right around this point was when we noticed that when the Internet was moved out of government control, the DNS was still under the aegis of the USG via the NSF.
Joyce actually did most of the mechanical work in the IANA task, John's efforts were more on the intellectual side. But, John and Joyce had been dong the IANA task, funded by DARPA, for a number of years now.
But, trouble erupted aftre
Josh Quittner wrote a story about selling mcdonalds.com to burger king in Wired magazine. This happened right after the internic began charging for domain names which made the company that had cultivated com/net/org very rich.
People are funny about their names and began to argue.
Geeks argued with geeks on the issue of should there be one non profit registry in charge of E V E R Y T H I N G or should there be hundreds if not thousands of clones of the com registry and let the invisible hand of Adam Smith take care of things.
Lawyers argued with lawyers as people registered names the same as trademarks companies had and tried to sell them to them, while other lawyers defended domain name owners who had had their names taken away by big business through legal shenanigans.
Within the US government 13 agencies participated in a discussion about where to move the Internic contract. The department of Commerce claimed to have all the answers, so everyone chuckled and gave it to them.
The rift in the community hit the press and got under the skin of enough poeple inside the beltway in Washington DC that it went up the food chain until it got to Ira Magaziner, fresh from the disaster that was Hillary Clinton's health plan.
And together with big business and various world governments, Ira came up with this:
This is a 10 year old drawing, it's much much, more complicated today.
