Tech Community Mourns Dave Farber, Architect of Internet's Open Foundations

News of Dave Farber's passing has reverberated through technical communities like NANOG (North American Network Operators' Group), where his legacy as a network architecture pioneer is being widely commemorated. Farber, often called the 'grandfather of the Internet,' championed principles of openness and decentralization during critical formative years.

Farber's technical contributions spanned decades: He co-designed the first operational distributed computer system (DCS) in the 1970s, helped establish NSFNET (the National Science Foundation Network that preceded commercial internet), and advocated for policy frameworks enabling permissionless innovation. His work directly influenced TCP/IP adoption through academic networks. As a professor at University of California Irvine, Carnegie Mellon, and University of Delaware, he mentored generations of engineers including early internet architects like Rusty Russell and Phil Gross.

Community tributes highlight his contrarian stance against centralized control. On NANOG's mailing list, network engineers recalled Farber's insistence that 'intelligence belongs at the endpoints' – a philosophy resisting carrier-centric models that later enabled innovations like peer-to-peer protocols and end-to-end encryption. His Interesting People mailing list became an early model for open technical discourse, predating modern forums.

Counter-intuitively, some note Farber's vision faced institutional resistance. Telecommunications providers initially dismissed decentralized networking as impractical, while academic peers questioned open-source collaboration's sustainability. Yet his persistence helped establish the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)'s consensus-driven standards process, now foundational to web interoperability.

Critics occasionally argued Farber's idealistic approach underestimated security risks inherent in open systems. However, proponents maintain that his architectural principles enabled rapid global scaling precisely because they avoided centralized choke points – a trade-off still debated in modern net neutrality and cybersecurity policy.

Technical historian Jay Hauben noted: 'Farber treated network design as social architecture. His refusal to patent DCS components set precedent for RFC-style open documentation.' This ethos persists in today's MANRS (Mutually Agreed Norms for Routing Security) initiatives and decentralized web projects.

With no direct corporate affiliation, Farber's influence operated through academic channels and grassroots persuasion – an increasingly rare model in today's platform-dominated internet. His death prompts reflection on whether similar consensus-driven infrastructure evolution remains possible amid fragmented commercial interests.

Obituary: University of Pennsylvania