This website, and every single system on the Internet, has a name. This name is provided to represent the address number of the machine or storage device that is connected to the Internet. If these addresses and names were random you would not be able to find the websites you are searching for, use your email, or engage with anyone else outside of a small network, if at all. The association of address number for each online device is done using rules set out by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).
ICANN was formed in 1998 as a global not-for-profit corporation providing the address structures that make the Internet stable and interoperable. According to it’s website: “ICANN doesn’t control content on the Internet. It cannot stop spam and it doesn’t deal with access to the Internet. But through its coordination role of the Internet’s naming system, it does have an important impact on the expansion and evolution of the Internet.” In 2006, ICANN signed a new agreement with the United States Department of Commerce (DOC) that moved the private organization towards full management of the Internet’s system of centrally coordinated identifiers. In its newest form the corporation is a collaboration between US and international groups that oversee the naming protocol structure of the entire Internet.
ICANN is responsible for managing the Internet Protocol address spaces using standards like Internet Protocol version 4 and 6 (IPv4 and IPv6), assignment of addresses to regional Internet registries, maintaining registries of Internet identifiers, and management of the top-level domain name space (DNS root zone).
ICANN’s primary principles of operation have been described as helping preserve the operational stability of the Internet; to promote competition; to achieve broad representation of global Internet community; and to develop policies appropriate to its mission through bottom-up, consensus-based processes.
Infrastructure is a term that is defined in different ways. The Oxford English Dictionary notes that originally it was meant to describe military roads and structures like bridges. The word was imported from French, where it describes a subgrade, the original material underneath pavement or a railway bed. It comes from a combination of the Latin prefix “infra”, meaning “below” and “structure”.