What is ICANN (What is a Registry)?
Formed in October 1998, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is a non-profit, private sector corporation formed by a broad coalition of the Internet’s business, technical, academic, and user communities. ICANN has been recognized by the U.S. Government as the global consensus entity to coordinate the technical management of the Internet’s domain name system, the allocation of IP addresses, the assignment of protocol parameters, and the management of the root server system. ICANN is dedicated to preserve the operational stability of the Internet; to promote competition; to achieve broad representation of the global Internet community; and to coordinate policy through private sector, bottom-up, consensus-based means. ICANN is located at “http://www.ICANN.org”. The Canadian equivalent for “.ca” domain names, the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) is located at “http://www.cira.ca”.
