In 1991, the
National Science Foundation (NSF) contract with the
Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI) to operate the
Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) expired. The need for an Internet Society was announced June 1991 at the ITC13 Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark. The
Internet Architecture Board (IAB) actively encouraged the formation of a non-profit professional society. The intent was for the Internet Society to be designed to be primarily a grass-roots organization, as free as possible from domination by any single organization or subset of the Internet community. This arrangement was formalized in
RFC1602 in 1993.
Anthony Rutkowski was appointed the first executive director of ISOC in 1994, after serving as vice-president and founding trustee for two years. The same year, ISOC founded its first Chapter in Japan and opened a permanent international headquarters in Reston, Virginia. In 1995,
Lawrence Landweber succeeded Vint Cerf as ISOC President. In 2012, on ISOC's 20th anniversary, it established the
Internet Hall of Fame, an award to "publicly recognize a distinguished and select group of visionaries, leaders, and luminaries who have made significant contributions to the development and advancement of the global Internet". On June 8, 2011, ISOC mounted
World IPv6 Day to test
IPv6 deployment. In 2012 ISOC launched Deploy360, a portal and training program to promote
IPv6 and
DNSSEC. On June 6, 2012, ISOC organized the
World IPv6 Launch, this time with the intention of leaving IPv6 permanently enabled on all participating sites. In 2016, Deploy 360 extended its campaigns to include
Mutually Agreed Norms for Routing Security (MANRS) and
DNS-based Authentication of Named Entities (DANE). In September 2016, the Internet Society indicated that it would not seek to obtain a license from the
Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) of the US Department of the Treasury that would allow it to fund the activities of Iranian nationals. This caused considerable distress to ISOC members in Iran, who were thus unable to launch an Internet Society chapter in Iran, and saw a fellowship revoked that the Internet Society had awarded to fund the travel of Iranian students to visit the Internet Governance Forum in Mexico. In 2017 ISOC's North America Region launched an annual Indigenous Connectivity Summit with an event in
Santa Fe, New Mexico. In subsequent years the event has been held in
Inuvik, NWT, and
Hilo, Hawaii. In December 2017 ISOC absorbed the standards body Online Trust Alliance (OTA) which produces an annual Online Trust Audit, a Cyber Incident Response Guide, and an
Internet of Things (IoT) Trust Framework. In August 2018 the Internet Society organized the IETF more formally as the IETF Administration LLC (IETF LLC) underneath ISOC. The IETF LLC continues to be closely associated with ISOC and is significantly funded by ISOC. In 2019, the Internet Society agreed to the sale of the Public Interest Registry (PIR) to
Ethos Capital for $1.135 billion, a transaction initially expected to be completed in early 2020. The Internet Society said it planned to use the proceeds to fund an
endowment. The Public Interest Registry is a non-profit subsidiary of the Internet Society which operates three top-level domain names (.ORG, .NGO, and .ONG), all of which have traditionally focused on serving the non-profit and non-governmental organization communities. The sale was met with significant opposition due to involving the transfer of what is viewed as a public asset to a
private equity investment firm. In late January 2020, the
ICANN halted its final approval of the sale after the
Attorney General of California requested detailed documentation from all parties, citing concerns that both ICANN and the Internet Society had potentially violated their public interest missions as registered charities subject to the laws of California. In February, the Internet Society's
Chapter Advisory Council (which represents its membership) began the process to adopt a motion rejecting the sale if certain conditions were not complied with. On April 30, 2020, ICANN rejected the proposal to sell the PIR to Ethos Capital. == Support of United Nations Internet Governance Initiative ==