IP address blocks are allocated by IANA, which is managed by, you guessed it, ICANN. Just sayin'. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Assigned_Numbers_Autho

IP address blocks are allocated by IANA, which is managed by, you guessed it, ICANN. Just sayin'. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Assigned_Numbers_Authority#Oversight http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Assigned_Numbers_Autho... It all is top-down at the core. (And it kind of has to be, because as much as we think of the Internet as "decentralized", it is a communication network, and so centralized administration is often the most efficient and sane way of doing things.)