ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) was formed in 1998. It is a not-for-profit public-benefit corporation with participants from all over the world dedicated to keeping the Internet secure, stable and interoperable. It promotes competition and develops policy on the Internet's unique identifiers.
The RIPE NCC and the RIPE community work closely with ICANN in a number of areas:
More information on the Regional Internet Registries (RIRs).
In accordance with ripe-436, "Global Policy for the Allocation of the Remaining IPv4 Address Space", the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) has today allocated the final five /8 blocks of IPv4 address space to the five Regional Internet Registries (RIRs).
On 1 February 2011, the IANA allocated two /8s of IPv4 address space to APNIC, the Regional Internet Registry (RIR) for the Asia Pacific region. This means that only five /8s of IPv4 address space are left in the IANA free pool and the "Global Policy for the Allocation of the Remaining IPv4 Address
The RIPE NCC announces today that the Internet has reached an important milestone with the publication of the root zone key tonight between 19:30 - 22:30 UTC. This key enables the widespread deployment of the Domain Name Server Security Extensions (DNSSEC) protocol, which the RIPE NCC has been supporting for almost two decades.