What’s ICANN? What’s its role?

Cre­at­ed in 1998, ICANN (Inter­net Cor­po­ra­tion for Assigned Names and Num­bers) is a non-prof­it inter­na­tion­al orga­ni­za­tion of Cal­i­forn­ian right, which head office is at San Diego, in Cal­i­for­nia.

The main pur­pose of ICANN is to allo­cate the Inter­net pro­to­col address­es spaces, to attribute the pro­to­col iden­ti­fi­er (IP), to man­age the domain name sys­tem of top lev­el for gener­ic codes (gTLD), to assign the coun­try codes (ccTLD), and to car­ry out the func­tions of the root servers sys­tem man­age­ment.

ICANN coor­di­nates the oper­a­tion and evo­lu­tion of the DNS root servers.

ICANN decides the open­ing of any new exten­sion, man­ages the Top Lev­el Domain (TLD) list like the .com, .net, .org, .fr, .uk…, entrusts the TLD tech­ni­cal man­age­ment to an orga­ni­za­tion (called reg­istry), which itself del­e­gates the com­mer­cial man­age­ment to a reg­is­trar.

ICANN has for mis­sion to main­tain the Internet’s oper­a­tional sta­bil­i­ty, to pro­mote the com­pe­ti­tion, to assure a glob­al rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the Inter­net com­mu­ni­ties.

ICANN doesn’t con­trol the con­tent pub­lished on the Inter­net. It can­not put an end to spam and doesn’t man­age in any way the access to the Inter­net. But through its coor­di­na­tion role with­in the names attri­bu­tion sys­tem on the Inter­net, it has a sig­nif­i­cant influ­ence on the Internet’s devel­op­ment and evo­lu­tion.

ICANN is a strate­gic orga­ni­za­tion with an estab­lished eco­nom­ic pow­er, the cre­ation of new exten­sions allow­ing to gen­er­ate new wealth and new dig­i­tal assets.

Please find the ICANN news on their web­site and on Nameshield’s blog.

Source: Nameshield’s White paper – Under­stand­ing domain names