1. Yikes! This was more than I wanted to know, but thanks for the info. Let's get back to the Internet itself. Who administers it?

The governance and administration of the Internet is overseen by various organizations composed mostly of volunteers from the global Internet community. These organizations consist of the Internet Society (ISOC), the Internet Architecture Board, the Internet Engineering Task Force, and the Internet Research Task Force. The administrative organizational structure of the Internet is shown in Figure 3.7.

Figure 3.7: The administrative organizational structure of the Internet.

The Internet Architecture Board (IAB), formerly known as the Internet Activities Board, is responsible for the overall planning and designing of the Internet. Some of its responsibilities include setting Internet standards, managing the publication of RFC documents (discussed later), and resolving technical issues. Assigned to the IAB are the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF). IETF is primarily concerned with addressing short- or medium-term Internet engineering issues. For example, IETF was responsible for examining the design and implementation of a new Internet Protocol, IPv6 (discussed later), the Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) routing scheme (see Chapter 7), and other initiatives such as enabling TCP/IP to support multimedia more efficiently. IRTF works on long-term research projects. An example of its work is the e-mail privacy issue. Both task forces also have steering committees that prioritize and coordinate their respective activities. IETF's steering committee is called the Internet Engineering...