The IETF was initially supported by the federal government of the United States but since 1993 has operated under the auspices of the Internet Society, a non-profit organization with local chapters around the world.

[2] Each working group normally has appointed two co-chairs (occasionally three); a charter that describes its focus; and what it is expected to produce, and when.

[citation needed] The Internet Architecture Board (IAB) oversees the IETF's external relationships.

The IAB also manages the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF), with which the IETF has a number of cross-group relations.

[7] A nominating committee (NomCom) of ten randomly chosen volunteers who participate regularly at meetings, a non-voting chair and 4-5 liaisons, is vested with the power to appoint, reappoint, and remove members of the IESG, IAB, IETF Trust and the IETF LLC.

It provides the final technical review of Internet standards and is responsible for day-to-day management of the IETF.

[16] The first IETF chair was Mike Corrigan, who was then the technical program manager for the Defense Data Network (DDN).

[16] Also in 1986, after leaving DARPA, Robert E. Kahn founded the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI), which began providing administrative support to the IETF.

[17] Effective March 1, 1989, but providing support dating back to late 1988, CNRI and NSF entered into a cooperative agreement, No.

NCR-8820945, wherein CNRI agreed to create and provide a "secretariat" for the "overall coordination, management and support of the work of the IAB, its various task forces and, particularly, the IETF".

[18] In 1992, CNRI supported the formation and early funding of the Internet Society, which took on the IETF as a fiscally sponsored project, along with the IAB, the IRTF, and the organization of annual INET meetings.

Cerf, Kahn, and Lyman Chapin announced the formation of ISOC as "a professional society to facilitate, support, and promote the evolution and growth of the Internet as a global research communications infrastructure".

Representatives from non-governmental entities (such as gateway vendors)[28] were invited to attend starting with the fourth IETF meeting in October 1986.

These meetings have grown in both participation and scope a great deal since the early 1990s; it had a maximum attendance of 2810 at the December 2000 IETF held in San Diego, California.

Multiple, working, useful, interoperable implementations are the chief requirement before an IETF proposed specification can become a standard.

This has allowed the protocols to be used in many different systems, and its standards are routinely re-used by bodies which create full-fledged architectures (e.g. 3GPP IMS).

For protocols like SMTP, which is used to transport e-mail for a user community in the many hundreds of millions, there is also considerable resistance to any change that is not fully backward compatible, except for IPv6.

[citation needed] The IETF chairperson is selected by the NomCom process for a two-year renewable term.