The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is a nonprofit private organization headquartered in the Playa Vista section of Los Angeles, California, United States, that was created on September 18, 1998, and incorporated on September 30, 1998 to oversee a number of Internet-related tasks previously performed directly on behalf of the U.S. government by other organizations, notably the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, which ICANN now operates. ICANN is responsible for the coordination of the global Internet's systems of unique identifiers and, in particular, ensuring its stable and secure operation. This work includes coordination of the Internet Protocol address spaces and assignment of address blocks to regional Internet registries, for maintaining registries of Internet protocol identifiers, and for the management of the top-level domain name space, which includes the operation of root name servers. Most visibly, much of its work has concerned the DNS policy development for internationalization of the DNS system and introduction of new generic top-level domains. The actual technical maintenance work of maintenance of the central Internet address pools and DNS root registries ICANN performs pursuant to the "IANA function" contract. Wikipedia [ - ]

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is a nonprofit private organization... [ + ]