Scott Bradner is a senior figure in the area of

Internet governance Internet governance consists of a system of laws, rules, policies and practices that dictate how its board members manage and oversee the affairs of any internet related-regulatory body. This article describes how the Internet was and is currentl ...

. He serves as the secretary to the

Internet Society The Internet Society (ISOC) is an American nonprofit advocacy organization founded in 1992 with local chapters around the world. Its mission is "to promote the open development, evolution, and use of the Internet for the benefit of all people ...

and was formerly a trustee. He is on the board of ARIN, the North American IP address registry. He has also held numerous senior leadership roles on the

Internet Engineering Task Force The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is a standards organization for the Internet and is responsible for the technical standards that make up the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP). It has no formal membership roster or requirements and a ...

(IETF) which develops

Internet standard In computer network engineering, an Internet Standard is a normative specification of a technology or methodology applicable to the Internet. Internet Standards are created and published by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). They allow ...

s. Until his retirement in July 2016, he was also University Technology Security Officer at

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...

. In the mid-1990s Bradner established himself an authority on developing an institution to succeed the

Internet Assigned Numbers Authority The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) is a standards organization that oversees global IP address allocation, autonomous system number allocation, root zone management in the Domain Name System (DNS), media types, and other Interne ...

(IANA). IANA managed the Internet's

domain name system The Domain Name System (DNS) is a hierarchical and distributed naming system for computers, services, and other resources in the Internet or other Internet Protocol (IP) networks. It associates various information with domain names assigned to ...

, but was essentially run by

Jon Postel Jonathan Bruce Postel (; August 6, 1943 – October 16, 1998) was an American computer scientist who made many significant contributions to the development of the Internet, particularly with respect to standards. He is known principally for be ...

. As one of a number of close advisers to Postel, Bradner sought to maintain "Internet self-governance"—the idea that the users of the network should decide the rules by which they would abide. In 1996 at a conference of the Harvard Information Infrastructure Project, Bradner described two conundrums of the Internet: "Who says who makes the rules?" and "Who says who pays for what?"

References

External links

Home page
Living people Harvard University faculty Internet pioneers Year of birth missing (living people) {{academic-stub