Remembering Jon Postel — And the Day He Hijacked the Internet
One January day in 1998, Jon Postel emailed eight of the 12 organizations that served as address books for the entire internet. He told them to reconfigure their computer servers so that they pulled addresses not from a government-backed operation in Herdon, Virginia, but from a machine at the computing facility he helped run at the University of Southern California. And they did.
Source: wired.com