20 Facts About ICANN

The numbering facilities ICANN manages include the Internet Protocol address spaces for IPv4 and IPv6, and assignment of address blocks to regional Internet registries.

ICANN managed the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority under contract to the United States Department of Commerce and pursuant to an agreement with the IETF.

ICANN formerly operated from the same Marina del Rey building where Postel formerly worked, which is home to an office of the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California.

However, ICANN's headquarters is located in the nearby Playa Vista neighborhood of Los Angeles.

Per its original by-laws, primary responsibility for policy formation in ICANN was to be delegated to three supporting organizations, each of which was to develop and recommend substantive policies and procedures for the management of the identifiers within their respective scope.

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VeriSign's challenge that ICANN overstepped its contractual rights is currently outstanding.

ICANN has been the subject of criticism as a result of its handling of RegisterFly, and the harm caused to thousands of clients as a result of what has been termed ICANN's "laissez faire attitude toward customer allegations of fraud".

The mention of the word "spam" in the title of the ICANN memo is somewhat misleading since ICANN does not address issues of spam or email abuse.

In 2010, ICANN approved a major review of its policies with respect to accountability, transparency, and public participation by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.

From its founding to the present, ICANN has been formally organized as a nonprofit corporation "for charitable and public purposes" under the California Nonprofit Public Benefit Corporation Law.

ICANN relies on some advisory committees and other advisory mechanisms to receive advice on the interests and needs of stakeholders that do not directly participate in the Supporting Organizations.

The members of this group must not be affiliated with ICANN, but are instead members of the broader DNS community, volunteering to become a Trusted Community Representative.

ICANN holds periodic public meetings rotated between continents for the purpose of encouraging global participation in its processes.

However, there are criticisms from ICANN constituencies including the Noncommercial Users Constituency and the At-Large Advisory Committee that there is not enough public disclosure and that too many discussions and decisions take place out of sight of the public.

One task that ICANN was asked to do was to address the issue of domain name ownership resolution for generic top-level domains .

In 2013, the initial report of ICANN's Expert Working Group has recommended that the present form of Whois, a utility that allows anyone to know who has registered a domain name on the Internet, should be "abandoned".

Partly as a response to this criticism, ICANN initiated an effort to protect trademarks in domain name registrations, which eventually culminated in the establishment of the Trademark Clearinghouse.

The current contract that the United States Department of Commerce has with ICANN expired in 2015, in its place the NTIA will transition oversight of the IANA functions to the 'global multistakeholder community'.

The final resolution says ICANN should be controlled internationally by September 2015.

In May 2019, ICANN decided in favor of granting exclusive administration rights to amazon.