ICANN might be the most important non-profit organization you’ve never heard of.  Based in nondescript office building just off Lincoln Boulevard in the Marina del Rey section of Los Angeles, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is charged with (among other things) mapping human-readable domain names to internet IP addresses   Although technically a sovereign organization, historically ICANN has been under the control of the Dept. of Commerce of the United States, the country that invented the plumbing for – and tacitly claims ownership of – the internet.

Until now.

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The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is the non-profit agency responsible for, well, assigning names (domain names ) to numbers (IP addresses).  In today’s thoroughly commercialized internet, this involves fundamental issues of both Intellectual Property and Internet Protocols.

In case you haven’t heard, they have some big plans to change the way the domain name system (and by extension, the web) works – starting next year.

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