Abbreviation | ISOC |
---|---|
Formation | December 11, 1992 [1] |
Founders | |
54-1650477 [2] | |
Legal status | 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization [2] |
Purpose | Internet development, infrastructure, accessibility and standards |
Headquarters | Reston, Virginia, U.S. [3] |
Region served | Global |
Sally Wentworth [4] [5] | |
Ted Hardie [4] | |
Subsidiaries |
|
Revenue (2018) | US$56,762,624 [3] |
Expenses (2018) | US$45,104,865 [3] |
Employees (2018) | 110 |
Volunteers (2018) | 4,099 (IETF, IESG, IAB, IRTF) [3] [7] |
Website | internetsociety |
Internet |
---|
Internetportal |
Internet history timeline |
Early research and development:
Merging the networks and creating the Internet:
Commercialization, privatization, broader access leads to the modern Internet: Contents
Examples of Internet services:
|
The Internet Society (ISOC) is an American nonprofit advocacy organization founded in 1992 with local chapters around the world. Its mission is "to promote the open development, evolution, and use of the Internet for the benefit of all people throughout the world". It has offices in Reston, Virginia, U.S., and Geneva, Switzerland.
The Internet Society has regional bureaus worldwide, [8] composed of chapters, organizational members, [9] and, as of July 2020, more than 70,000 individual members. [10] The Internet Society has a staff of more than 100 and was governed by a board of trustees, whose members are appointed or elected by the society's chapters, organization members, and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). [11] [12] The IETF comprised the Internet Society's volunteer base. [13] Its leadership includes Chairman of the Board of Trustees, Ted Hardie; and President and CEO, Sally Wentworth. [14] [15]
The Internet Society created the Public Interest Registry (PIR), [16] launched the Internet Hall of Fame, [17] and served as the organizational home of the IETF. [9] The Internet Society Foundation was created in 2017 as its independent philanthropic arm, [18] which awarded grants to organizations. [19]
In 1991, the National Science Foundation (NSF) contract with the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI) to operate the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) expired. The then Internet Activities Board (IAB) sought to create a non-profit institution that could take over the role. In 1992 Vint Cerf, Bob Kahn and Lyman Chapin announced the formation of the Internet Society as "a professional society to facilitate, support, and promote the evolution and growth of the Internet as a global research communications infrastructure", which would incorporate the IAB, the IETF, and the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF), plus the organization of the annual INET meetings. [20] This arrangement was formalized in RFC1602 in 1993. [21]
In 1999, after Jon Postel's death, ISOC established the Jonathan B. Postel Service Award. The award has been presented every year since 1999 by the Internet Society to "honor a person who has made outstanding contributions in service to the data communications community".
By mid-2000, the Internet Society's finances became precarious, and several individuals and organizations stepped forward to fill the gap. Until 2001, there were also trustees elected by individual members of the Internet Society. Those elections were "suspended" in 2001. This was ostensibly done as a fiscal measure due to the perception that the elections were too expensive for the precarious financial state of the organization. In later Bylaw revisions, the concept of individual member-selected trustees went from "suspended" to being deleted altogether.
In late 2001, leaders from Afilias (a domain name registry) approached the Internet Society CEO Lynn St.Amour, to propose a novel partnership to jointly bid for the .org registry. In this model, the Internet Society would become the new home of .org, and all technical and service functions would be managed by Afilias. Afilias would pay for all bid expenses and would contribute towards the Internet Society payroll while the bid was under consideration by ICANN. The Internet Society Board approved this proposal at their Board meeting in 2001.
In 2002 ISOC successfully bid for the .org registry and formed the Public Interest Registry (PIR), to manage and operate it.
In 2010, ISOC launched its first community network initiative to deploy five wireless mesh-based networks in rural locations across India. [22]
In 2012, on ISOC's 20th anniversary, it established the Internet Hall of Fame, an award to "publicly recognize a distinguished and select group of visionaries, leaders, and luminaries who have made significant contributions to the development and advancement of the global Internet".
On June 8, 2011, ISOC mounted World IPv6 Day to test IPv6 deployment.
In 2012 ISOC launched Deploy360, a portal and training program to promote IPv6 and DNSSEC. [23]
On June 6, 2012, ISOC organized the World IPv6 Launch, this time with the intention of leaving IPv6 permanently enabled on all participating sites.
In 2016 Deploy 360 extended its campaigns to include Mutually Agreed Norms for Routing Security (MANRS) and DNS-based Authentication of Named Entities (DANE).
In 2017 ISOC's North America Region launched an annual Indigenous Connectivity Summit with an event in Santa Fe, New Mexico. [24] In subsequent years the event has been held in Inuvik, NWT, [25] and Hilo, Hawaii. [26]
In December 2017 ISOC absorbed the standards body Online Trust Alliance (OTA) which produces an annual Online Trust Audit, a Cyber Incident Response Guide, and an Internet of Things (IoT) Trust Framework. [27]
In August 2018 the Internet Society organized the IETF more formally as the IETF Administration LLC (IETF LLC) underneath ISOC. [28] The IETF LLC continues to be closely associated with ISOC and is significantly funded by ISOC.
The ubiquity of the Internet in modern-day society has prompted António Guterres, the United Nations Secretary-General to convene a panel of professional experts to discuss the future of the Internet and the role of the Internet in globalized digital cooperation. Three models were proposed after several rounds of discussion, i.e. a Digital Commons Architecture (DCA), a Distributed Co-Governance Architecture (CoGov), and a reformed Internet Governance Forum (IGF+). As of October 2020, the ISOC is leading and facilitating multi-round meetings for Stakeholders' Dialogue to collect, compile, and submit the inputs of worldwide professionals and experts for future governance of the Internet. [29]
In the late 1990s, the Internet Society established the Jonathan B. Postel Service Award. [30] It was presented every year to honor a person who has made outstanding contributions in service to the data communications community.
The Internet Society's activities included MANRS (Mutually Agreed Norms for Routing Security) – which was launched in 2014 to provide crucial fixes to reduce the most common threats to the Internet's routing infrastructure. [31]
The society organized the Africa Peering and Interconnection Forum (AfPIF) to help grow the Internet infrastructure in Africa and hosts Internet development conferences in developing markets. [32] [33]
The society offered Deploy360, an information hub, portal and training program to promote IPv6 and DNSSEC. [23]
In 2017 it launched an annual Indigenous Connectivity Summit to connect tribal communities, starting with an event in Santa Fe, New Mexico. In subsequent years the event was held in Inuvik, NWT, and Hilo, Hawaii. [34] [35]
The society also publishes reports on global Internet issues, [36] and created tools, surveys, codes, and policy recommendations to improve Internet use. [37] [38] [39] The society supports projects to build community networks and infrastructure, secure routing protocols, and advocate for end-to-end encryption. [40] [9] [41]
In 2019 the Internet Society agreed to the sale of the Public Interest Registry (PIR) to Ethos Capital for $1.135 billion, a transaction initially expected to be completed in early 2020. The Internet Society said it planned to use the proceeds to fund an endowment. [42] The Public Interest Registry is a non-profit subsidiary of the Internet Society which operates three top-level domain names (.ORG, .NGO, and .ONG), all of which have traditionally focused on serving the non-profit and non-governmental organization communities.
The sale was met with significant opposition due to involving the transfer of what is viewed as a public asset to a private equity investment firm. [43] In late January 2020, the ICANN halted its final approval of the sale after the Attorney General of California requested detailed documentation from all parties, citing concerns that both ICANN and the Internet Society had potentially violated their public interest missions as registered charities subject to the laws of California. [44] In February, the Internet Society's Chapter Advisory Council (which represents its membership) began the process to adopt a motion rejecting the sale if certain conditions were not complied with. [45] On April 30, 2020, ICANN rejected the proposal to sell the PIR to Ethos Capital. [46] [47]
In September 2016, the Internet Society indicated that it would not seek to obtain a license from the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) of the US Department of the Treasury that would allow it to fund the activities of Iranian nationals. [48] This caused considerable distress to ISOC members in Iran, who were thus unable to launch an Internet Society chapter in Iran, and saw a fellowship revoked that the Internet Society had awarded to fund the travel of Iranian student to visit the Internet Governance Forum in Mexico.[ citation needed ]
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is a global multistakeholder group and nonprofit organization headquartered in the United States responsible for coordinating the maintenance and procedures of several databases related to the namespaces and numerical spaces of the Internet, ensuring the Internet's stable and secure operation. ICANN performs the actual technical maintenance work of the Central Internet Address pools and DNS root zone registries pursuant to the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) function contract. The contract regarding the IANA stewardship functions between ICANN and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) of the United States Department of Commerce ended on October 1, 2016, formally transitioning the functions to the global multistakeholder community.
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is a standards organization for the Internet and is responsible for the technical standards that make up the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP). It has no formal membership roster or requirements and all its participants are volunteers. Their work is usually funded by employers or other sponsors.
The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) is a standards organization that oversees global IP address allocation, autonomous system number allocation, root zone management in the Domain Name System (DNS), media types, and other Internet Protocol–related symbols and Internet numbers.
The Internet Architecture Board (IAB) is a committee of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and an advisory body of the Internet Society (ISOC). Its responsibilities include architectural oversight of IETF activities, Internet Standards Process oversight and appeal, and the appointment of the Request for Comments (RFC) Editor. The IAB is also responsible for the management of the IETF protocol parameter registries.
The domain name .org is a generic top-level domain (gTLD) of the Domain Name System (DNS) used on the Internet. The name is truncated from 'organization'. It was one of the original domains established in 1985, and has been operated by the Public Interest Registry since 2003. The domain was originally "intended as the miscellaneous TLD for organizations that didn't fit anywhere else." It is commonly used by non-profit organizations, open-source projects, and communities, but is an open domain that can be used by anyone. The number of registered domains in .org has increased from fewer than one million in the 1990s, to ten million in 2012, and held steady between ten and eleven million since then.
The Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC) is a suite of extension specifications by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) for securing data exchanged in the Domain Name System (DNS) in Internet Protocol (IP) networks. The protocol provides cryptographic authentication of data, authenticated denial of existence, and data integrity, but not availability or confidentiality.
.info is a generic top-level domain (gTLD) in the Domain Name System (DNS) of the Internet. The name is derived from information, although registration requirements do not prescribe any particular purpose.
An internationalized domain name (IDN) is an Internet domain name that contains at least one label displayed in software applications, in whole or in part, in non-Latin script or alphabet or in the Latin alphabet-based characters with diacritics or ligatures. These writing systems are encoded by computers in multibyte Unicode. Internationalized domain names are stored in the Domain Name System (DNS) as ASCII strings using Punycode transcription.
The domain name arpa is a top-level domain (TLD) in the Domain Name System (DNS) of the Internet. It is used predominantly for the management of technical network infrastructure. Prominent among such functions are the subdomains in-addr.arpa and ip6.arpa, which provide namespaces for reverse DNS lookup of IPv4 and IPv6 addresses, respectively.
The Canadian Internet Registration Authority is the organization that manages the .ca country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for Canada. Its offices are located at 979 Bank Street in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. CIRA sets the policies and agendas that support Canada's internet community and Canada's involvement in international internet governance. It is a member-driven organization with membership open to all that hold a .ca domain. As of March 2023, there were more than 3.3 million active .ca domains.
The domain names example.com, example.net, example.org, and example.edu are second-level domain names in the Domain Name System of the Internet. They are reserved by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) at the direction of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) as special-use domain names for documentation purposes. The domain names are used widely in books, tutorials, sample network configurations, and generally as examples for the use of domain names. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) operates websites for these domains with content that reflects their purpose.
Afilias, Inc. was a US corporation that was the registry operator of the .info, .mobi and .pro top-level domain, service provider for registry operators of .org, .ngo, .lgbt, .asia, .aero, and a provider of domain name registry services for countries around the world, including .MN (Mongolia), .AG, .AU (Australia), .BM (Bermuda), .BZ (Belize), .AC, .GI (Gibraltar), .IO .ME (Montenegro), .PR, .SC, .SH, and .VC. Afilias also provided ancillary support to other domains, including .SG (Singapore), .LA (Laos), and .HN (Honduras). It was merged into Identity Digital in 2022.
Internet governance consists of a system of laws, rules, policies and practices that dictate how its board members manage and oversee the affairs of any internet related-regulatory body. This article describes how the Internet was and is currently governed, some inherent controversies, and ongoing debates regarding how and why the Internet should or should not be governed in the future.
WHOIS is a query and response protocol that is used for querying databases that store an Internet resource's registered users or assignees. These resources include domain names, IP address blocks and autonomous systems, but it is also used for a wider range of other information. The protocol stores and delivers database content in a human-readable format. The current iteration of the WHOIS protocol was drafted by the Internet Society, and is documented in RFC 3912.
IPv4 address exhaustion is the depletion of the pool of unallocated IPv4 addresses. Because the original Internet architecture had fewer than 4.3 billion addresses available, depletion has been anticipated since the late 1980s when the Internet started experiencing dramatic growth. This depletion is one of the reasons for the development and deployment of its successor protocol, IPv6. IPv4 and IPv6 coexist on the Internet.
Désirée Zeljka Miloshevic is an Internet public servant, and was a special advisor to the chair of the United Nations' Internet Governance Forum Multi-stakeholder Advisory Group. Additionally, she is Senior Public Policy and International Affairs Advisor in Europe for Afilias, the domain name registry.
.au Domain Administration (auDA) is the policy authority and industry self-regulatory body for the .au domain, which is the country-code top-level domain (ccTLD) for Australia. It was formed in 1999 to manage the .au ccTLD with the endorsement of the Australian Government and the authority of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). It is a not-for-profit membership organisation that promotes and protects the .au domain space.
Satish Babu is a Free Software activist, early Internet advocate, and development professional based out of Kerala, India. He is the founding Director of the International Centre for Free and Open Source Software (ICFOSS), an autonomous academic/research institution of the Government of Kerala, India, where he worked from March 2011 to September 2015. He was earlier the CEO of SIFFS, an NGO of small-scale artisanal fishers of south India; a co-founder and President of InApp Information Technologies; and is associated with international and national professional societies such as IEEE, Internet Society (ISOC), ICANN, and the Computer Society of India (CSI).
Public Interest Registry is a not-for-profit based in Reston, Virginia, created by the Internet Society in 2002 to manage the .ORG top-level domain. It took over operation of .ORG in January 2003 and launched the .NGO and .ONG top-level domains in March 2015.
Ethos Capital is an American private equity investment firm founded in 2019 in Boston, Massachusetts, in order to make majority and control minority investments in middle-market companies, primarily across North America and Europe. It is best known for attempting and failing to gain control of the .org internet domain.
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