Internet is not owned or controlled by any government or entity. Its technologies, rules of operations are actually defined by the Internet Society, ISOC, a volunteer organization. ISOC has a few sub-organizations that perform various tasks. ISOC mainly approves appointments to the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) from nominees submitted by the IETF and other nomination committees.
IAB, Internet Architecture Board, is a technical advisory group of ISOC. Its responsibilities are to appoint IETF chair and IESG candidates, serve as an appeal board, manage editorial content and publications such as RFC.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is a technical coordination body to perform the following responsibilities:
- Internet domain names
- IP address numbers
- protocol parameter and port numbers
- the stable operation of the Internet's root server system.
IESG, Internet Engineering Steering Group, is chartered by ISOC to provide technical management of IETF activities and the Internet standard process. The IESG manages the IETF working groups and is directly responsible for the actions associated with entry into and processing along the Internet standard track including final approval of specifications as Internet standards.
IRTF, Internet research Task Force, is to create research groups for long term development of Internet protocols, applications, architecture and technologies.
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is a large open international community of network designers from the industry to define technical standards of the Internet. The TCP/IP protocols and many other protocols are well documented in the Request For Comments (RFC), which are drafted, discussed, circulated and approved by the IETF committees. All documents are open and free and can be found online in the IETF site listed in the reference.
RFC, Request for Comments, is a series of notes and documents about the Internet. The RFC documents discuss many aspects of computing and computer communication focusing in networking protocols, procedures, programs, and concepts, but also including meeting notes, opinion, and sometimes humor. The specification documents of the Internet protocol suite, as defined by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and its steering group (the IESG), are published as RFCs. Many of the TCP/IP protocols and PPP protocols are fully documented by RFC's.
Internet Organizations: ISOC, IAB, IETF, ICANN, IESG and IRTF
Related Terms: ISOC, IAB, IESG, IRTF, IETF, ICANN, RFC
Reference Links:
http://www.isoc.org: Official site of ISOC
http://www.iab.org: Official site of IAB
http://www.ietf.org: Official site of IETF
http://www.icann.org: Official site of ICANN