IAHC


Prior to the globalization of the Internet, its assignment of domain names was administered within the research and academic communities through the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority. As the Internet grew to a global service, in the 1990s, there was increasing pressure to add more "generic" top-level domain names, beyond the initial set, such as.com and.org and the two-letter country codes. Extensive debate within the Internet operational community did not resolve this. Finally, a composite group was formed, to create a proposal for the enhancement. The International Ad Hoc Committee was composed of members named by a variety of Internet and International sponsoring organizations.
The IAHC had a limited charter: "The IAHC is an international multi-organization effort for specifying and implementing policies and procedures relating to iTLD."

Sponsoring Organizations

Members of IAHC:
The IAHC produced a draft proposal with a number of administrative recommendations, beyond the set of candidate gTLD names. These included:
The group's work culminated in a "Memorandum of Understanding". It describes a procedure of allocation and administration for domain names, specifically top-level domains. The "Generic Top Level Domain Memorandum of Understanding" was open to signature by any organization, with approximately 226 groups doing so.
The organization was dissolved on 1 May 1997. Its effort was subsumed under the authority of ICANN. When
the U.S. government's activities concerning Internet Domain Name administration issued its preliminary "" in 1998, the efforts of the
IAHC were not referenced. However the final "White Paper" gave credit to the
IAHC efforts: "The IAHC issued a draft plan in December
1996 that introduced unique and thoughtful concepts for the evolution of
DNS administration." The structure of ICANN, including the UDRP and the registrar/registry construct, was
ultimately based on the substance of the proposals in the IAHC gTLD-MoU.

Proposed TLDs

The IAHC proposed seven new top-level domains:
The gTLD-MoU interim Policy Oversight Committee replaced .store with .shop.
The IAHC and gTLD-MOU effort did not produce implementation of these names.