Internet Protocol as Social Contract
From conversation with Claude
Early internet protocols (SMTP, DNS, HTTP) succeeded not because they were technically optimal but because they were governance-light enough for competing institutions to agree to run them. RFC culture — “rough consensus and running code” — is itself a historically specific way of doing standards, closer to common law than statute.
DNS in particular is a strange hybrid: a technical hierarchy (root → TLD → domain) laid over a political one (ICANN, historically US-government-adjacent, now multistakeholder-ish). The technical elegance of the tree structure and the politics of who controls the root are separable questions that get conflated constantly.
Note various new TLD’s like .fyi