Internet Assigned Numbers Authority or IANA

Question

Describe IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority)?

Answer 1

IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) is essentially the registration authority for IP addresses and well known ports. Initially, IANA also administered domain names but that has now been taken over by ICANN, which we will discuss in a moment. IANA enforces policy with respect to allocating blocks of IP addresses and reviews requests for assigning new well known sockets. With the advent of CIDR and the IPv4 address conservation measures we discussed in Chapter 5, most large blocks of addresses go to regional administrations or large ISPs. As one can see from the list of Class A allocations, there is a lot of available space. Furthermore, there are a large number of Class As assigned to companies that don't need 32 million addresses, as well as many assigned to DoD facilities that are unlikely to be connected to the public Internet. Of the three organizations listed, this one is the least political. Although there are times when IANA comes under considerable political pressure when some other organization doesn't think it is getting a fair allocation of IP addresses.