Talk:Internet Assigned Numbers Authority

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While the Department of Commerce funds the operation of IANA by a private contractor, it is by no means clear that they have any authority to designate IANA except by common consent, since IANA (the role) has no formal authority over anyone. 18.24.0.120 19:25, 18 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Contents

[edit] charsets

IANA seems to be the authority for specifing charsets / character sets names for HTML. Can someone comment on these? See http://www.iana.org/assignments/character-sets --Abdull 22:14, 23 December 2005 (UTC)

IANA operates hundreds of registries for all sorts of protocols. I changed the wording of the article to reflect this better. --kjd 20:42, 29 December 2005 (UTC)

Charsets were added to IANA's responsibilities in RFC 1341, published in June 1992. Check Appendix F. Rules have since been updated multiple times. --Alvestrand 14:00, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Contracts

Mike St. Johns claims that the 1985 IANA contract was a subcontract from SRI/DCA to ISI for Jon's time

I think DoC funded IANA from the end of the DoD funding (see COOK report link) until ICANN took over. In fact, as I remember it, the existence of the DoC/ISI contract was used as a political lever to keep all the IANA functions together in one contract - "splitting it up would mean that we would have to recompete it - keeping it together, we can transfer it".

Will try to find a reference. Alvestrand 13:50, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

Found a good reference. The ICANN contract has the history. --Alvestrand 14:02, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Start of IANA

Multiple web sites claim that IANA started in 1972, but this is probably confusing it with the RFC Editor. Mike St. Johns says:

The date of interest is probably 1 Jan 82 with the flag day to swap to TCP/IP. Before that there wasn't really a numbers registry of any type. BBN owned the numbers space on the ARPANet and the rest was mostly embedded inside the applicable protocols. My guess is that the '72 date is probably when the first RFC was published and Jon took on the RFC editor role.

Alvestrand 13:51, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Superceded contracts (or not)

I reverted this edit: [1]

The reason is that the two agreements described by the two paragraphs are actually between different parties; one is between USC/ISI (the university) and ICANN, the other is between the US government and ICANN. USC has as far as I know not relinquished its claim that it may hold rights to old IANA IPR; it's leased those rights to ICANN for the performance of the IANA function, but keeps carefully silent about any actual transfer of ownership. Any later agreement that supercedes this one would have to have USC/ISI as a party.

Tracing contracts is a pain in the posterior.... --Alvestrand 06:04, 21 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] order of the sections

i had changed the order of the the sections. i put oversight and history at the begging and i got a message saying it was vandalism. i think thats not vandalism that is the way it is with other articles (puting history frist that is)

(i think this is what it should be)

1 History of IANA

2 Oversight

3 IANA's Responsibilities

3.1 IP Addresses

3.2 Domain Names

3.3 Protocol parameters

4 External links

The comment doesn't mention vandalism.. I didn't do the revert, but nonetheless don't agree with your reordering. I think IANA's responsibilities are more pertinent than its ancient history and oversight, and therefore think they should be first. Most people would want to read the article about IANA to find out what it does. --kjd 04:37, 16 October 2006 (UTC)


[edit] Fine details - how does it work?

My zonealarm firewall just told me it had detected a new network (one that I was connected to). I checked the network IP address and it came back as IANA; does anyone have any idea why? I mean, shouldn't I just connect to a server at my ISP which draws on a unique-number bank to allocate my IP? Surely if this were normal I'd have seen it before... buh?

172.159.190.150 11:11, 4 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Fair use rationale for Image:Iana.jpg

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BetacommandBot (talk) 22:15, 13 February 2008 (UTC)