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A key aspect of the society’s mission statement (www.isoc.org/isoc/mission) is:
To assure the open development, evolution and use of the Internet for the benefit of
people throughout the world.

Detailed points of the aims of its mission are that it:
1 Facilitates open development of standards, protocols, administration and the technical
infrastructure of the Internet
2 Supports education in developing countries specifically, and wherever the need exists
3 Promotes professional development and opportunities for association to Internet
leadership
4 Provides reliable information about the Internet
5 Provides forums for discussion of issues that affect Internet evolution, development
and use – technical, commercial, societal, etc.
6 Fosters an environment for international cooperation, community, and a culture that
enables self-governance to work
7 Serves as a focal point for cooperative efforts to promote the Internet as a positive tool
to benefit all people throughout the world
8 Provides management and coordination for on-strategy initiatives and outreach efforts
– humanitarian, educational, societal, etc.
It can be seen that although it focuses on technical issues of standards and protocols, it is
also conscious of how these will affect global society.

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF, www.ietf.org)
This is one of the main technical bodies. It is an international community of network
designers, operators, vendors and researchers concerned with the development of the Inter-
net’s architecture and its transport protocols such as IP. Significant subgroups are the
Internet Architecture Board, a technical advisory group of ISOC with a wide range of
responsibilities, and the Internet Engineering Steering Group, which is responsible for over-
seeing the activities of the IETF and the Internet standards process.
An interesting feature of the IETF, in common with the other organizations, is that it
operates using electronic communications as much as possible, without recourse to meet-
ings. The IETF has just three main meetings per year. New technical specifications are
largely agreed through e-mail and discussion forums.

The World Wide Web Consortium (www.w3.org)

This organization is responsible for web standards. Its director is Tim Berners-Lee who
effectively invented the World Wide Web in the late 1990s while working at CERN, the Euro-
pean Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva. He wrote the first WWW client (browser) and
the first WWW server along with most of the communications software, defining URLs,
HTTP and HTML. Today, it focuses on improving publishing standards such as HTML and
XML. XML is an important development in forming what the WWW organization refers to
as the ‘semantic web’ – see www.w3.org/ Consortium/Points for details. The consortium also
aims to promote accessibility to the web for those with disabilities – for instance, it is work-
ing on a voice-based browser. It is another relatively small organization, with fewer than 100
full-time staff in different countries.

Telecommunications Information Networking Architecture Consortium TINA-C
(www.tina.com)
This consortium is somewhat different from the others in that it takes a higher-level view of
how applications communicate over communications networks. It does not define detailed
standards. Its principles are based on an object-oriented approach to enable easier integra-
tion of systems. In its terms: