Ever wondered who decides how the Internet should evolve? It's a fascinating process with changes looking a lot like the amendments to the US Constitution. You can literally predict how the Internet will evolve if you know where to look. Dive in. RFC Basics First, the basics. Each change to how the Internet operates is submitted through a Request for Comments. The first one is RFC 1 is from Apr 1969, the latest to date is RFC 9438 from Aug 2023. Yep, the numbers are ordinal. Nearly every (!) aspect of Internet communication has an RFC that defines its operation. RFCs started a simple meeting notes taken by a 24yo grad student. When the Internet started with the creation of ARPANET in late 1960s, it was basically only used by a few grad student groups on the West Coast. The problem was that the grad students weren’t told how to use the net. So they would just get together and riff on things like communication protocols, in all honesty expecting the adults from the East Coast to come and tell them about the real protocols soon enough. But then they decided that someone should take notes on their meetups. Steve Crocker volunteered and unknowingly wrote RFC 1. Fun fact: Steve didn’t know how to call the notes so as not to sound like the grad students were stepping on the toes of ARPANET engineers, so he picked the least formal, most innocently sounding name he could think of - Request for Comments. As it happens, RFCs ended up establishing all the protocols that the Internet runs on. Tell the Past I recommend you check out the RFCs below. These little devils basically define the Internet as you know it. 791 - IP 9293 - TCP 1034 - DNS 2616 - HTTP 2818 - HTTPS 821 - SMTP With a quick Google / ChatGPT search, you can become a real Internet archivist. Want to know when Stanford’s AI lab got online? Look no further than RFC 152. Here’s how they hoped to use the Internet back then: Predict the Future But what’s really fascinating is that you can tell early signs of the future just by reading through RFCs. All of these RFCs already exist: 9340 - Architecture for Quantum Networking 8578 - Deterministic Networking 8505 - IoT / on-device AI RFCs try to anticipate future network demands and adjust to them preemptively, which means you can use them to look into the future. Quantum Networking? How cool is that. Change the World You can even submit an RFC yourself and possibly change how the Internet works. They even have the email of the person who edits independent submissions on their website. The guy’s name is Eliot. Learn more about RFCs! I found that the best place to browse RFCs is to start with the RFC-Editor list to see how RFCs are added over time, and then dive into individual RFCs through the IETF Datatracker. It shows the history of the drafts, which RFCs are obsolete, etc. Very cool. Go on, become the archivist and future-teller of the Internet!