Networking standards can be proprietary, open or defacto.

• proprietary: owned by a company. If No alternative exists the industry adopts this standard.
• defacto: adopted by the whole industry
• open: created by neutral organizations ensuring compatible products

Open standards are more popular than proprietary standards. Thus newer standards are almost all open.

One of the biggest standard organizations is the international organization for standardization (ISO). Note that ISO isn’t an acronym but a Greek word “ISOS” (equal). Other well-known international organizations are ANSI, ITIC, IEEE, EIEA/TIA, ITU-T & ETSI. These organizations management and develop standards rather than individual privatize standards.

As for Internet standard organizations, there is a group of related organizations.

1. (ISOC) Internet society: overall responsibility is to develop standards
2. (IAB) Internet architecture board: overseen by the ISOC, makes high level decisions for internet technology development
3. (IETF) Internet engineering task force: responsible for most of the current Internet standards
4. (IESG) Internet engineering steering group: manages that IETF
5. (IRTF) Internet research task force: IETF sibling and does long term research
6. (IRSG) Internet research steering group: leads the IRTF

Internet registration authorities are centralized organizations. They coordinate protocol parameters and globally assigned resources such as IP addresses. The IANA – Internet assigned numbers authority was in charge of IP address assignment, DNS and protocol paramters. Today the ICANN - Internet corporation for assigned names and numbers does these duties. IANA works under ICANN to assign IP addresses. IANA used to directly assign IP addresses but today a hierarchical classless addressing system called CIDR - classes inter domain routing is used. IANA assigns blocks of IP addresses to RIR - regional Internet registries. There are 4:

1. (APNIC) Asia Pacific network information center
2. (ARIN) American registry for Internet numbers
3. (LACNIC) Latin American and Caribbean Internet address registry
4. (RIPENCC) Responsible for Europe

Internet standards are described in RFC’s (request for comments). The RFC process describes how an Internet standard is created.

1. First an Internet draft is used to create an idea
2. After review its placed into the Internet standard track (proposed standard)
3. Then it moves to a draft standard
4. Finally it moves to an Internet standard

Many RFC’s are implemented without reaching Internet standard. Other RFC’s describe experimental technologies.