No one or organization controls the Internet; instead, a variety of international organizations work to make it what it is. Let’s take a brief look at a few of these organizations.
ICANN
ICANN stands for Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers and as the name implies, it is the main organization responsible for legislating and regulating the parts of the web that have to do with domains and their connection to IP addresses.
IGF
The Internet Governance Forum was established in 2006 as a forum that runs under the United Nations. It is a venue for discussions about the direction of the Internet on a global level. IGF supports the United Nations Secretary-General in carrying out the mandate from the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) with regard to convening a new forum for multi-stakeholder policy dialogue - the Internet Governance Forum (IGF).
W3C
The World Wide Web Consortium is responsible for keeping standards in web protocol development such as HTML and XML. Basically they specify the standards that browsers use when supporting particular languages. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web (abbreviated WWW or W3).
W3C also engages in education and outreach, develops software and serves as an open forum for discussion about the Web.
IANA
The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority is one of the oldest Internet regulatory organizations, having started its activities in the 1970s. It is responsible for coordinating IPs and registries and regulates how they work together. Whilst the Internet is renowned for being a worldwide network free from central coordination, there is a technical need for some key parts of the Internet to be globally coordinated, and this coordination role is undertaken by IANA.
IANA’s various activities can be broadly grouped in to three categories:
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* Domain Names
IANA manages the DNS Root, the .int and .arpa domains, and an IDN practices resource. -
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* Number Resources
IANA coordinates the global pool of IP and AS numbers, providing them to Regional Internet Registries. -
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* Protocol Assignments
Internet protocols’ numbering systems are managed by IANA in conjunction with standards bodies.
This mission statement describes the role of the IANA Department:
- “The IANA team is responsible for the operational aspects of coordinating the Internet’s unique identifiers and maintaining the trust of the community to provide these services in an unbiased, responsible and effective manner.”
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