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.

Comments

What vs How

[fembots]

It's nice to know what each organistion does, but is there an article about how they actually do it?

For instance, how (pardon my ignorance) ICANN actually controls numbers and names, technically. Is there a mainframe of some sort that stores them? How does ICANN make changes?

Re:What vs How

[Zeinfeld]

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).

Someone tries every day, to be more precise there are over 1000 attacks against core DNS each day. Most of the roots are run on a basis that I regard as far too casual given the critical nature of the infrastructure.

There are not 13 root DNS servers, there are 13 root IP addresses which is not the same thing at all. Several of the roots are anycast so there are actually multiple data centers serving them. The number of root servers is much larger than 13.

Another pretty major omission from the list is OASIS which has roughly the same degree of influence as W3C and considerably more than the IETF.

The premise of the list is somewhat misguided. The standards bodies themselves don't have any influence on the Internet, its the members and the software providers who have influence. The point of the standards work is to get buy in from the necessary stakeholders, not to solve problems by committee.

Giving the choice between having my spec rejected by the IESG and having it rejected by Microsoft or the Apache group I'll choose the first. One of the big problems with the IETF is that many folk think that they are somehow 'in control'. Not on this Internet you ain't, if I don't get a chance to vote on who holds an office I don't see why I have to respect the decisions made by the office holder. I certainly don't see why I should wait two years or more for them to come to a decision.

I helped set up W3C when the IETF web standards effort collapsed. HTML was originally proposed in the IETF and turned into a disaster. When W3C was not interested in doing the work I do I played a leading role in one of the early OASIS Web Security standards. I am currently sitting in a W3C working group where the discussion has got into some particularly arcane details of XML.

Standards organizations are a vehicle, they are neither the driver, nor the road.

ISOC/IETF vs ICANN

[elfuq]

No one (and this article itself) has ever really objectively described the compromises/disputes between the old internet governance infrastructure and the increasingly corporate-dominated and somewhat authoritarian ICANN.

ICANN is supposed to have a standards pillar. However all internet standards are really developed by the IETF, published by the RFC Editor and adopted by the community the way that they have always been. (The exception being HTML/HTTP and its derivatives - the W3C is entirely corporate)

There's some mention here of the dispute over IANA. Back in the day, it was just Postel, and he demonstrated entire control over the root servers. But now it's really not clear who controls the root servers, allocates IP address ranges to the regional registries, and assigns other numbers. This stuff should be transparent!