# US to Hand Over Control of Internet DNS System in October 2016



## JMH3143

> *This past week, on August 16, the US National Telecommunications & Information Administration (NTIA) announced it was ready to relinquish control over the Internet domain name system (DNS) infrastructure to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a nonprofit organization.*
> 
> Few people know that the Internet was developed in the US, as part of a military research project funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), currently known as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
> 
> Across the years, as the Internet became more popular, the US kept control over a key part of the entire ecosystem, the domain naming system, which is the infrastructure translating the easy-to-remember domains such as "softpedia.com" into an IP address of the server where the actual website was stored.
> 
> * The transitioning process started 18 years ago*
> 
> In 1998, the US decided to give some of the control over the DNS system to the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), a department of a newly formed private nonprofit organization ICANN, based in Los Angeles.


US to Hand Over Control of Internet DNS System in October 2016


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