Scott Bradner

Scott Bradner is a senior figure in the area of Internet governance. He serves as the secretary to the Internet Society 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 (IETF) which develops Internet standards.

He works at Harvard University (and has the distinctive email address "sob" at harvard.edu). In fact, Mr. Bradner does not have a middle name, and the moniker was recommended by a former girlfriend.

In the mid 1990s Mr Bradner distinguished himself as one of the most trustworthy and reliable voices in the area of "Internet governance" -- the process of developing an institution to succeed the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), which managed the Internet's domain name system, but was essentially run by a computer science professor, Jon Postel. As one of a number of close advisers to Dr. Postel, Mr. Bradner sought to maintain the spirit of "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, Mr. Badner famously described two conundrums of the Internet that still hold: "Who says who makes the rules?" and "Who pays for what?"