For much of the 1980s and 1990s, Jon Postel, a computer scientist at the University of Southern California, managed the internet’s top-level domains — .com, .net, and .org — along with more than 200 two-letter country codes like .uk and .jp, largely by himself. At first, it was a fitting — albeit hefty — undertaking: Postel had, after all, helped create the internet’s direct predecessor, ARPANET.

But as the dot-com boom dawned in the late 1990s and websites proliferated, this arrangement quickly became untenable, and Postel pushed for a “fully self-regulated system” supported by the U.S. government. With his help, the nonprofit Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) was incorporated in September 1998. The next month, Postel, who was expected to be ICANN’s chief technology officer, died of complications from heart surgery. ICANN moved forward without him.

These days, many longtime bloggers, creators, and individual website owners feel the tension embodied in Postel’s sudden death and cut-short legacy: You could be gone in an instant, and without a plan, your website — which perhaps houses your creative output, career portfolio, or other vestige of your life and life’s work — could disappear from the public square. 

Ironically, the system Postel helped build — a system that today manages an estimated 401.6 million domains — makes this kind of succession management difficult. That’s because a domain is purchased through a subscription, with a seller like GoDaddy or Namecheap allowing the buyer to register it in their name for up to 10 years at a time.