I am a bit confused about how internet governance actually works, and what do all these different organizations actually do, and how is everything related? Are these organizations all part of a single governance structure with clear mandates or are there overlaps?
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First, as the Internet is an interconnection of (mostly) privately owned and operated networks that exist all over the world without any central point of control, the concept of “Internet governance” is a bit of a misnomer — the Internet as a whole isn’t governed, rather at best it is coordinated via mutual agreement and the various independent networks all over the world agree to cooperate and voluntarily follow a set of conventions that allow those networks to interoperate.
One of those conventions is to mutually agree that top most level of Internet names are coordinated by an organization in the US called ICANN. ICANN provides a place where people interested in policies about Internet names, primarily what the top-most layer of names should be, can meet, argue, and eventually come up with rules about what (top level like .COM or .DENTIST or .UK) names can exist, who operates them, how much they cost, etc.
In order to implement those rules, ICANN has a wholly-owned affiliate organization called “Public Technical Identifiers” (PTI) that perform what are known as the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) functions. PTI has its own board and staff, (sort of) independent from ICANN, however PTI receives all of its funding from ICANN and PTI staff work in ICANN’s offices. One of the IANA functions is to update the directory of top-level domains at the direction of ICANN, so when the folks who meet at ICANN come up with a new top-level domain, ICANN directs PTI to add that top-level domain to the domain name system, making it publicly available.
Another of the IANA functions is to allocate blocks of IP addresses at the direction of the Regional Internet Registries (RIRs). There are 5 RIRs, of which ARIN is one (the others being AfriNIC, APNIC, LACNIC, and RIPE-NCC). The RIRs are geographical monopolies, serving continental sized regions (e.g., AfriNIC service region is the continent of Africa).
Aside from being initially recognized by ICANN and requesting new blocks, the RIRs are independent of ICANN. However, like ICANN, the RIRs provide a venue where people can meet, argue, and come up with rules although the people who go to RIR meetings are primarily interested in how IP addresses are handed out and managed. When the communities associated with each RIR agree on rules, those rules are then implemented by the RIR. The only real interaction between the RIRs and ICANN are when an RIR runs out of IP addresses to hand out to their customers — they ask ICANN (via PTI) to allocate a new block of addresses via the IANA numbers function.
In this context, when people talk about “Internet governance”, they’re usually talking about how the ICANN or RIR communities make rules for the naming and addressing of the Internet respectively.
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