ICANN is formed to coordinate Internet identifiers

Through the 1990s, functions such as assigning domain names, IP address blocks and protocol parameters had been handled informally, largely through IANA under a single individual's stewardship and U.S. government contracts, an arrangement that did not scale as the Internet became commercially and internationally significant. ICANN was created as a nonprofit organization to formally coordinate these naming and numbering functions, with a board and processes intended to represent a broader international community of technical and commercial stakeholders rather than one government or one person. Centralizing this coordination in a dedicated institution let the same domain name and address system keep working consistently as the number of registrars, registries and countries involved multiplied.