ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) is a not-for-profit public-benefit corporation with participants from all over the world dedicated to keeping the Internet secure, stable and interoperable. It promotes competition and develops policy on the Internet’s unique identifiers. Through its coordination role of the Internet’s naming system, it does have an important impact on the expansion and evolution of the Internet.

What does it do and what’s its mission?

ICANN’s mission is to help ensure a stable, secure, and unified global Internet. To reach another person on the Internet you need to type an address – a name or a number – into your computer or another device. That address must be unique so computers know where to find each other. ICANN helps coordinate and support these unique identifiers across the world. 

ICANN was formed in 1998 as a not-for-profit public-benefit corporation with a community of participants from all over the world. It promotes competition and develops policy on the Internet’s unique identifiers. Without this coordination, we would not have one global Internet.

How ICANN is organized?

At the heart of ICANN’s policy-making is what is called a “multistakeholder model.” This decentralized governance model places individuals, industry, non-commercial interests, and government on an equal level. Unlike more traditional, top-down governance models, where governments make policy decisions, the multistakeholder approach used by ICANN allows for community-based consensus-driven policy-making. The idea is that Internet governance should mimic the structure of the Internet itself borderless: and open to all. For more information please visit https://icann.org