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By Bob Calverley
The USC News Service
Consistent with a U.S. government-proposed plan, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), which coordinates the Internet's address system, domain names, and protocols, is preparing to transition its responsibilities to an international not-for-profit corporation run by a board of directors representing the spectrum of Internet interests around the world.
The IANA function currently operates under a U.S. government contract awarded to the Information Sciences Institute (ISI) at the University of Southern California's School of Engineering.
IANA plays a central role in the management of the domain-name system to support and implement the community consensus about the appropriate overall structure of the system. For example, IANA coordinates the generic top-level domain names designated by Internet suffixes such as "com," "edu" and "org," and manages the country code top-level domains, such as "jp" for Japan and "fr" for France, by delegating them to name registries in each country.
In addition, IANA coordinates Internet numeric addresses, such as "172.16.0.1," by delegating management of address blocks to registries. Three regional registries serve the Americas, Europe and the Asia Pacific region.
"IANA will be transitioning within an evolutionary, not revolutionary, model -- guided by the community consensus that has served it successfully in the past," says Jon Postel, the ISI research scientist who largely created the Internet's domain name system and has headed IANA since the Internet's inception. "As proposed, the new organization will have enlarged community representation, including address and name registries, protocol organizations and user/industry organizations."
Dr. Postel says the change is the outcome of discussions and input from the user community, the Internet Engineering Task Force and the Internet Architecture Board, as well as public comment on the National Telecommunications and Information Administration's "Green Paper" and recently released "White Paper."
"All of these discussions indicate strong support for the transition of IANA into a not-for-profit corporation," says Postel. "While it is planned that IANA initially will be incorporating as a separate company in the United States, offices subsequently may be added in other countries as necessary to carry out IANA's mission. The organization plans to move from USC to new and independent offices.
"It is expected that the new IANA will then be supported by the Internet community representing four operational areas -- address registries, name registries, protocol organizations and user/industry organizations. A transitional board of directors for the replacement organization will be nominated by organizations within each of the four operational areas with full international participation."
"The transitional board will provide interim guidance and facilitate the process to establish the first full-term board and select the chief executive officer," Postel says. "I have begun working with USC to facilitate IANA's transition to a nonprofit organization."
More information about the transition can be found on IANA's website.
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