Seeking Indie Status

The day the White House released its white paper calling for a nonprofit group to administer Internet addresses, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority said it was moving ahead with its plans to become an international nonprofit entity.

The IANA, based at USC’s Information Sciences Institute in Marina del Rey, has coordinated the Internet’s address system, domain names and protocols since the early 1970s and receives funding under a U.S. government contract. But as commercial interests have taken on a larger role in the global computer network, support has grown for turning the IANA into an independent organization.

“As proposed, the new organization will have enlarged community representation, including address and name registries, protocol organizations and user/industry organizations,” Jon Postel, the ISI research scientist who has headed the IANA since its start, said Friday.

Postel noted that the IANA transition was devised with input from Internet users, the Internet Engineering Task Force and the Internet Architecture Board. The group also took into account public comments gathered by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, which authored the white paper and the green paper that came before it.

It is not clear whether the Clinton administration will approve of IANA’s move, since the White House and the Internet community have differed in the past on the best way to deal with issues of Internet governance. But it is also not clear whether the federal government would be able to stop the IANA and its supporters in the Internet community.