David Clark’s path to becoming an Internet pioneer began with “bake offs.” For Internet protocols.
It was 1975 at MIT, where his first job after completing a doctorate in electrical engineering was to write the Internet protocols for the Multics system.
“Internet protocols were not well specified at the time,” Clark recalls. “Everyone would come with their implementation. We’d see if they could work, and we would fix them.” These meetings—bake offs—ended up generating more than the protocols: “The word Internet didn’t exist back then. The word itself came along there.”
It was an auspicious beginning to a decades-long, ongoing career that includes shaping the architecture of the Internet from its ARPANET origins, shepherding the Internet’s technical community, and teaching and mentoring generations of some of the world’s top computer scientists. A career that is uniquely befitting of the Jonathan B. Postel Service Award.
It is a testament to Jon Postel—who passed away in 1998 before he could witness the full scope of his contributions—that so many of his friends and former colleagues continue to shape the Internet today.
Clark is one those friends and former colleagues: When, in 1979, Vint Cerf asked Clark to take over as chairman of the Internet Working Group, which later became the Internet Architecture Board, he invited one other person do so: Jon Postel. “He wanted Jon’s wisdom,” said Clark.
Clark is famous, among other things, for his 1992 quote, “We reject: kings, presidents, and voting. We believe in: rough consensus and running code.”
The statement fast became an ethos for a community notoriously distrustful of top-down leadership. But Clark is quick to point out that if you keep overthrowing your leader, you wind up with another kind of problem.
Questions of power have been central to his thinking about the Internet and he has, over the years, immersed himself as much in questions of society and economics as he has in technical questions. “You cannot think about the future of the Internet as a technical question,” he says.
Clark sees the best of the Internet in its technical structure. And its greatest threats from its societal impacts. “The whole vision of the Internet was permissionless innovation. We had this techno optimistic view that good things would happen. But really, if you think about the techno optimistic view, it wasn’t optimistic about technology. It was optimistic about human behavior. And humans are really screwed up.”
He laments the centralization of the Internet and sees it as an accidental outcome of good intentions. “The secret of stabilizing a decentralized ecosystem is not how the packets flow but how the money flows,” he says. Designing for money instead would have shaped the Internet “so that everyone is equitably compensated and no one becomes a monopolist.” He attributes the overemphasis on packet flow for creating fertile ground for moneyed interests that benefit from centralized systems.
In the words of Vint Cerf, “it would be hard to overstate the contributions that David Clark has made to the creation and evolution of the Internet.” The Internet Society honors and thanks him for his groundbreaking work and decades of service.
About the Award
The Jonathan B. Postel Service Award is presented annually to an individual or organization that has made outstanding and sustained contributions in service to the Internet community. The award is named after Dr. Jonathan B. Postel to recognize and commemorate the extraordinary stewardship he exercised throughout a 30-year career in networking.
Header Image © Garrett A. Wollman CC BY 3.0, Headshot Courtesy of David Clark