History of IANA

IANA was established informally as a reference to various technical functions the Information Sciences Institute performed for the United States Department of Defense Advanced Research Project Agency on the ARPANET.

The earliest reference to a registry function is probably RFC 322, published on March 26, 1972, which had Vint Cerf and Jon Postel establishing a "socket registry" - this registry was published in the RFC series as RFC 433 in December 1972.

The first reference to the name "IANA" in the RFC series is in RFC 1060, published in 1990, but the function, and the term, was well established long before that; RFC 1174 says that "Throughout its entire history, the Internet system has employed a central Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA)...", and RFC 1060 lists a long series of earlier editions of itself, starting with RFC 349.

Jon Postel managed the IANA function from its inception until his passing in October 1998. After his death, Joyce Reynolds, who had worked with him on IANA for many years, managed the transition of the IANA function to ICANN.

The reason why Postel had the authority to perform the IANA function was that he had always done it in his position at the Information Sciences Institute, under its DOD contract, and did it well.

Starting in 1988, IANA was funded by the US government under a contract between the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and Information Sciences Institute (ISI). This contract expired in April 1997, but was extended to preserve IANA's function.

On December 24, 1998, USC entered into a transition agreement with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers ICANN, transferring the IANA function to ICANN, effective January 1, 1999, thus making IANA an operating unit of ICANN.

On February 8, 2000, the DoC entered into an agreement with ICANN to perform the IANA functions.

In June 1999, at its Oslo meeting, IETF signed an agreement with ICANN on the tasks that IANA would perform for the IETF; this is published as RFC 2860.

In November 2003, Doug Barton was appointed IANA manager.

In 2005, David Conrad was appointed as IANA manager.