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A Concise Guide to the Major Internet Bodies
alex simonelis submitted a good summary of the major internet bodies. If you hunger to know the difference between ICANN, IETF, ISOC and the rest of the alphabet soup of the governing bodies that make our beloved internet possible, this is a great place to look. It covers 10 major organizations.
ISOC Official Page IETF Official Page IESG Official Page IRTF Official Page IAB Official Page RFC Editor Official Page ICANN Official Page IANA Official Page W3C Official Page W3C encyclopedia article ICANN encyclopedia article IANA encyclopedia article
Creative Demolition
del.icio.us seems to be doing a good work on its own, though. Pretty impresive, according to the little time it has been working. Without Google, I could use del.icio.us any day.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
Well, it's all stored in DNS servers. You request a server and your browser does a DNS lookup at your primary DNS server, which is probably run by your ISP. If your primary DNS server doesn't know the correct IP, it asks a server higher up the chain (or gets your browser to ask, I can't remember which). If that server doesn't know, it goes one level higher. At the very top are the 13 root servers, run by people like VeriSign. If you want to make the Internet pretty useless, take out those servers (someone tried a couple of years ago).
Go forth and edit!
the World Taekwondo Federation?
WTH?
No. Once you've seen it, you'll never forget tubgirl.
Speaking of which, someone cuted it up nicely on B3ta recently...
http://www.b3ta.com/board/4332139
If you've never seen it, this gives you a chance to get the idea without burning the full horror of it into your brain forever.
PigPog.
DNS is part of it, it's the closest thing to the "mainframe" hypothesized by the grandparent, but the actual vehicle for the control is that they publish documents.
The DNS really only holds the mappings betweens IP addresses and host names. There are a few other things in there, but not all of the assigned numbers, by any means.
The IANA has responsibility for a lot of other things. Basically they get tasked in documents published by the IETF, called RFC's, to maintain registries of various assignments. For instance, the thing before the colon in a URL, called a "scheme" (http:, ftp:, mailto:, etc.) are registered with IANA, that maintains a registry pointing to protocol details. The fact that TCP's port 80 is where HTTP servers are normally listening is assigned by IANA.
Used to be that every couple of hundred RFC's IANA would publish one called "Assigned Numbers", that pretty much listed all of the well known ports, protocol numbers, URL schemas, and so on. Way back in the beginning, that even included IP address block assignments, but (obviously) it got to where that data changed too frequently, and the publication was out of date before it even came out. So, to solve the problem, the IETF came up with the DNS, and the IAB identified it as a necessary part of the Internet's architecture, so it got widespread adoption.
Now, the rest of the information from the Assigned Numbers documents is starting to get too unweildy, too, so they've set up a web site that has the information (http://www.iana.org/).