19981776 Club
A nonprofit is born in California to run the internet's address book
Esther Dyson takes the chair as ICANN incorporates, picking up work one researcher had run as a side job for decades.
For years, the entire naming system of the internet ran through one man's part-time attention: Jon Postel, a researcher at USC's Information Sciences Institute, who had told Congress in 1997 that managing domain names and addresses was a "side task" to his real work. On September 30, 1998, that arrangement ended. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers incorporated as a nonprofit in California, with Esther Dyson as founding chairwoman, taking over the IANA functions under contract to the U.S. Department of Commerce…
