Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

The Internet in all its manifestations—email, the World Wide Web, chat rooms, networking sites, intranets, and other interactive platforms—has been one of the main drivers for globalization. It enables the exchange and sharing of information, data, and viewpoints from individual to individual; organization to clients, members, or other stakeholders; and network to network with ever increasing speed, and, despite occasional attempts to regulate content, it maintains an openness to all forms of contributions. Less visible but key to its success is the openness of the community of users to new technical ways of providing content while maintaining a stable system of identification of network access and user points that allows information to go, in more or less traceable form, from one point to the other. The way the technical Internet community is managing this stability and openness is through the Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). Set up in 1998 as a not-for-profit corporation in California, its self-assigned role is to coordinate, at the overall level, the global Internet's system of unique identifiers, and, in particular, to ensure the stable and secure operation of the Internet's unique identifier systems, and to keep the Internet interoperable, that is, make sure that content and service from providers using different technical platforms remains accessible to all and, in turn, that no unnecessary technological barriers undermine the access to the Internet and its benefits for people with often very different resources at their hands. As such, ICANN plays a key role in the emerging network of structures that govern the functioning of the Internet not only as a technology platform but also in view of its social and political function within globalization.