IANA is a useful registry for numbers of all sorts (result codes for things like SMTP or NNTP, SNMP variables, you name it), and does a good job of keeping track of which numbers have been assigned to what. The vast majority of these numbers are assigned during the IETF standards process, as protocols are developed. Two sets of things that IANA has had historical responsibility for include the allocation of IP addresses and the delegation and maintenaince of certain DNS zones. Both of these have recently been politicized. Unfortunately the recently heavily politicized functions will still take some work to be separated from the ordinary functions, but I gather that is the ultimate objective. I also gather that IANA has been offered some two and a half years of funding both by APNIC and RIPE, which, if nothing else, should help protect the non-Americans from the total lunacy brewing in the USA, so that networks in the APNIC and RIPE regions can get on with building their parts of the Internet, and developing Internet protocols and tools. I can't resist a quip to tie this into NANOG. I have an outage report. America is broken. Route around it. Sean.