[1][2] Currently it is a function of ICANN, a nonprofit private American corporation established in 1998 primarily for this purpose under a United States Department of Commerce contract.

Before it, IANA was administered principally by Jon Postel at the Information Sciences Institute (ISI) of the University of Southern California (USC) situated at Marina Del Rey (Los Angeles), under a contract USC/ISI had with the United States Department of Defense.

IANA is broadly responsible for the allocation of globally unique names and numbers that are used in Internet protocols that are published as Request for Comments (RFC) documents.

[4] IANA maintains a close liaison with the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and RFC Editorial team in fulfilling this function.

[8] The RIRs divide their allocated address pools into smaller blocks and delegate them to Internet service providers and other organizations in their operating regions.

[10] IANA administers the data in the root nameservers, which form the top of the hierarchical Domain Name System (DNS) tree.

[11] This task involves liaising with top-level domain "Registrar-of-Record"s, the root nameserver operators, and ICANN's policy making apparatus.

[14] Past and present TCRs include Vinton Cerf, Dan Kaminsky, Dmitry Burkov, Anne-Marie Eklund Löwinder and John Curran.

Starting in 1988, IANA was funded by the U.S. government under a contract between the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the Information Sciences Institute.

It reflected a compromise and did not harshly condemn mass surveillance or include the words "net neutrality", despite initial support for that from Brazil.

[49] IANA was managed by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) under contract with the United States Department of Commerce (DOC) and pursuant to an agreement with the IETF from 1998 to 2016.

[2][50] The Department of Commerce also provided an ongoing oversight function, whereby it verified additions and changes made in the DNS root zone to ensure IANA complied with its policies.

The Internet Architecture Board (IAB), on behalf of the IETF, could terminate the agreement under which ICANN performs IANA functions with six months' notice.

On January 28, 2003, the Department of Commerce, via the Acquisition and Grants Office of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, issued a notice of intent to extend the IANA contract for three years.

[54][55] On March 14, 2014, the U.S. Department of Commerce announced its intent to transition key Internet domain name functions to a global multi-stakeholder community.

[56][57] In August 2016 ICANN incorporated Public Technical Identifiers, a non-profit affiliate corporation in California, to take over the IANA functions once the current contract expired at the end of September.