Who Manages the Internet?

COMP1260 > Understanding the Internet

Introduction The Internet has already presented its freedom and convenience to the whole world, so you might often hear that the Internet has no central control and management. However, such a well structured and democratic environment of the Internet is managing or organizing by the co-work or inherited work from several world-famous organizations.

...by students In china, the Internet is supervised by multifarious laws and regulations. Most of the Internet censorship laws are made by the government. A firewall is built on the Internet to banish critical online opinions, images, videos on corruption, political issues, controversial history, etc from Internet forums, blogs, and even major portals. Also, the government has the right to imprison a website that doesn’t content regime, including websites from other countries.

What management does the Internet need?

Internet management contains different areas of servers which are provided by several companies and organizations. For instance, Internet security, allocation and domain name assignment, online transportation, etc. Different companies and organizations each play an important part in inter-relationships in research, development and management of the Internet.

Different Internet management organizations and companies

inter-relationship of internet management

ISOC -- Internet Society

The ISOC (Internet Society) was built up in 1992. It’s a non-governmental organization which contains over 100 companies and thousands of groups. Their mission is to keep global Internet and related technologies educations update and pass on. The ISOC has responsibility to keep IAB and IETF under legal protection. Also, the ISOC offers financial and technical support to other Internet management organizations. The most effective job ISOC has done is defining the term “Internet” are legally free shared by the whole world.

IAB -- Internet Architecture Board

“The IAB is an independent committee of researchers and professionals with a technical interest in the health and evolution of the Internet system... IAB members are deeply committed to making the Internet function effectively and evolve to meet a large scale, high speed future.” by Vinton Gerf, The Internet Activities Board, May1990.

The IAB (Internet Activities Board) was built in 1979 by the ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency NET) Program Manager Vinton Cerf. At the beginning, it was named Internet Configuration Control Board (ICCB), after 4 years ICCB was reorganized to the Internet Activities Board (IAB). Until June, 1992, this organization has been finally decided present name “Internet Architecture Board”, in the mean time; IAB was described and renamed several times by different organizations or companies.

The IAB is grouped by 13 members, its main missions are:

1. Supervising the structure and the program of the internet
2. Controlling the publication rights
3. Appoint the members for IESG(Internet Engineering Task Force)
4. IETF relationships management
5. IANA management

IETF -- Internet Engineering Task Force

The IETF (internet Engineering Task Force) was created in 1986 by IAB. The employees in the IETF are able to program, design, and research internet studies, so IETF could support the technical specifications for the education that IAB needs. The IEFT also works in solving operational and technical issues in internet, and making suggestions to train organizations. Now a day, internet technique is getting more and more complicated. Thus, even though the number of talented people in IETF is considerable, but the IETF’s job is never getting easier.

IRTF -- Internet Research Task Force

The IRTF is under the management of IRSG (Internet Researching Steering Group); it is united by numbers of small individual research groups that study in researching the long term future of internet.

ICANN -- Internet Corporation For Assigned Names And Numbers

ICANN headquarters at USC ISI.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) manages the domain name system and allocation of IP addresses.

As internet growing to a global resource, the ICANN took out the technical infrastructure management for US Government agencies in 1998. The ICANN has three supporting Orgnizations:

1. The Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO) - deals with policy making on generic top-level domains (gTLDs).
2. The Country Code Names Supporting Organization (ccNSO) - deals with policy making on country-code top-level domains (ccTLDs).
3. The Address Supporting Organization (ASO) - deals with policy making on IP addresses.

IANA -- Internet Assigned Numbers Authority

Jonathon Postel was a miracle person and played important role in the internet universe by tracking of all the protocols, the identifiers and networks addresses / names.

IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) is located at University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute, and has provide services internet address, domain names and protocol parameter as registration organization since the early days of the internet. Jon Postel was starting keeping lists of network protocol numbers when the IANA was founded at 1969, and then he joined the ISI (Information Sciences Institute) to develop his knowledge and works in the internet field by 30 years until he passed away.

NSI -- Network Solutions

NSI takes a significant position in the entire global internet by maintaining the Internet Number Registry and managing the domain root server.

NSI (Network Solution Inc.) was the first one to provide registration service for domain names, and manages the central domain name system database still now. Because of the contract signed with NSF (National Science Foundation), NSI was paid by NSF for domain names registration s services in the tree public top-lever domains which are “.com”, “.net” and “.org”. NSI registered millions domain names in the year, and it was getting bigger and bigger by developing software and a central database to support all registrars of domain names.

Accredited Domain Name Registrars

As the website address, domain names must be professional, administrative and unique in the whole world, and also must be managerially controlled by professional organizations, such as Accredited Registrars.

They provide all services for domain name registration. Since they had been chosen as optional suppliers by ICANN which is Internet Corporation For Assigned Names And Numbers, now any of them can register a domain name. Cost and other services are the factors of competition within all the registrars. Most countries have their own services site, for instance, Canadian Registration services (www. cira.ca) provide Canadian domain name registered by ----.ca

Other Organizations

1. The Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) provides advice to ICANN from governments on issues of public policy, such as where there may be interaction between ICANN's policies and national laws or international agreements.
2. The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA)also has right to shut down a webpage or an internet portal.

Further Reading

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Controls_the_Internet%3F - wikipedia, "who controls the Internet? Illusions of a Borderless World" is a book by Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu
• http://www.livinginternet.com/i/iw_mgmt.htm - inernet management orgnizations
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICANN - Wikipedia, the ICANN
• http://boingboing.net/2009/11/12/mpaa-shuts-down-enti.html

References

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