Jonathan Bruce Postel (/pəˈstɛl/; August 6, 1943 – October 16, 1998) was an American computer scientist who made many significant contributions to the development of the Internet, particularly with respect to standards.

He is known principally for being the Editor of the Request for Comment (RFC) document series, for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), and for administering the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) until his death.

In March 1977, he joined the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California as a research scientist.

[13] On January 28, 1998, Postel, as a test, emailed eight of the twelve operators of Internet's regional root nameservers on his own authority and instructed them to reconfigure their servers,[14] changing the root zone server from then SAIC subsidiary Network Solutions' A.ROOT-SERVERS.NET (198.41.0.4) to IANA's DNSROOT.IANA.ORG (198.32.1.98).

[20] The significance of Jon Postel's contributions to building the Internet, both technical and personal, were such that a memorial recollection of his life and his work forms part of the core technical literature sequence of the Internet in the form of RFC2468 "I Remember IANA", written by Vint Cerf.

Perhaps his most famous legacy is from RFC760, which includes a robustness principle often called Postel's law: "an implementation should be conservative in its sending behavior, and liberal in its receiving behavior" (reworded in RFC 1122 as "Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send").

The award has been presented most years since 1999 by the Internet Society to "honor a person who has made outstanding contributions in service to the data communications community."

[24] The award was created by Vint Cerf as chairman of the Internet Society and announced in "I remember IANA" published as RFC 2468.