IP Addressing Fundamentals

The Internet's Caretakers

Numerous organizations, standards bodies, and even corporations function in different capacities. All of them contribute in some way to the Internet. Some allocate domain names (such as cisco.com) or assign IP addresses to the Internet's end users. Others create the technologies that make the Internet work or that let you use the Internet. All these entities are integral to the Internet's operation. We'll look at each one in this chapter, but only one can truly be considered the Internet's caretaker. That organization is the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).

IETF

The manner in which the Internet's technology base is developed and ratified might not be intuitively appreciated. In fact, the arrangement is one of ...