Question 1

What is an RFC, and how does an internet standard get made?

Accepted Answer

A **Request for Comments** is a numbered document published by the IETF describing a protocol, a procedure or an observation — and the name is a historical artefact that persists, because many RFCs are not requests for anything and are the definitive specification of how the internet works.

**Why the name.** The first was published in 1969, deliberately informal, to avoid the impression that a small group was issuing decrees. **The tentative name stuck**, and the tone it set — collaborative rather than authoritative — shaped the culture that followed.

**What an RFC actually is.** Once published, **an RFC is never changed**. Corrections are issued as errata; replacements are new RFCs that **obsolete** the old one. This is why you must check whether the RFC you are reading has been superseded, and why old numbers persist in conversation long after the content moved.

**The categories, which people conflate:**

**Standards Track** — Proposed Standard, then Internet Standard. **Most things people call standards are Proposed Standards** and never advance further, because deployment matters more than the label.

**Informational**, describing something without standardising it.

**Experimental**, **Best Current Practice**, and **Historic** for obsolete material.

**April Fools' RFCs**, a genuine tradition, published annually and occasionally mistaken for real specifications.

**How a standard is actually made:**

**An individual or group writes an Internet-Draft**, which expires after six months unless renewed — deliberately, to prevent abandoned proposals accumulating.

**A working group** discusses it on a mailing list, which is public and archived.

**Rough consensus and running code** is the guiding principle: **not unanimity, and not voting**, but the absence of sustained unresolved objection — plus, importantly, evidence that it actually works when implemented.

**Last call**, then review by the steering group.

**Publication**, with a number.

**Why it works.** Participation is open to individuals rather than to companies or countries; there are **no formal votes and no membership fee**; and adoption is voluntary. **A standard succeeds because people implement it**, which is a very different enforcement model from most standards bodies.

Question 2

Who actually runs the internet?

Accepted Answer

Nobody, and several bodies with narrow remits — which is the accurate answer rather than an evasive one. There is no central authority; there are institutions that coordinate specific scarce

Question 3

What do DNS record types like A, CNAME, MX and TXT actually do?

Accepted Answer

Each record type answers a different question about a domain, which is why a single domain has many records and why editing the wrong one breaks something unrelated. A — maps a name to an IPv4

Question 4

What does DHCP actually do?

Accepted Answer

Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol hands out network settings automatically, so a device joining a network can configure itself without anyone typing anything. What it supplies. Not just an IP

Question 5

What is WHOIS, and why is most of it hidden now?

Accepted Answer

WHOIS is the long-standing public directory of domain registration details — and the information it once exposed has largely been withdrawn, primarily because of data protection law. What it

Question 6

What is an autonomous system number (ASN)?

Accepted Answer

A globally unique identifier for a network under a single routing policy — an ISP, a large hosting company, a university, a bank. It is the unit in which the internet's routing table is expressed,

Question 7

What is TTL, and why do DNS changes take time?

Accepted Answer

Time to live is how long a DNS record may be cached before it must be looked up again — and it is the reason a change you made an hour ago is still not visible to everyone. Why caching exists.

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