ternet access is largely divided across economic ability? Why are people now con- sidering adding regulation and universal-service mandates to the Internet? What prob- lems will this solve? What problems will it exacerbate? Is it a good idea? Will such regulation fundamentally change the Internet from what it is today into something else? Although there are no concrete answers to these questions at the moment, it is a wonderful topic of discussion. A very good resource for many papers and studies on reg- ulatory issues is the Cato Institute, at www.cato.org/tech, which can serve as a starting point in studying the impacts of regulation. Today, no one agency is in charge of the Internet, although the Internet Society (ISOC; www.isoc.org) is a nonprofit, nongovernmental, international organization for Internet professionals that focuses on Internet standards, education, and policy issues. ISOC serves as the organizational home of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF; www.ietf.org), which oversees various organizational and coordinat- ing tasks. The IETF is an international community of network designers, opera- tors, vendors, and researchers whose job is to evolve the Internet and smooth its operation by creating technical standards through consensus. In addition to the IETF, ISOC is composed of a board of trustees, the Internet Architecture Board (IAB; www.iab.org), the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF; www.irtf.org), the Inter- net Engineering Steering Group (IESG; www.ietf.org), and the Internet Research Steering Group (IRSG; www.irsg.org). Chapter 8 The Internet and IP Infrastructures Another organization that is critical to the functioning and management of the Internet is the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA; www.iana.org), which is currently operated by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Num- bers (ICANN; www.icann.org) under a contract with the U.S. Department of Com- merce, which also provides ongoing oversight. IANA oversees IP address allocation, the Domain Name System (DNS),