New to the industry?
Brush up on the acronyms — from ASN to XML — most commonly used by the network engineers and internet technologists in our community.
Internet Community Organization Names
| Abbr | Meaning |
|---|---|
| AFRINIC | African Network Information Centre |
| AGWG | ARIN Government Working Group |
| APNIC | Asia Pacific Network Information Centre |
| ARIN | American Registry for Internet Numbers |
| ARPA | Advanced Research Projects Agency |
| ASO | Address Supporting Organization |
| ASO AC | ASO Address Council |
| CANTO | Caribbean Association of National Telecommunication Organizations |
| CITEL | Inter-American Telecommunication Commission |
| CTU | Caribbean Telecommunications Union |
| IAB | Internet Architecture Board |
| IANA | Internet Assigned Numbers Authority |
| ICANN | Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers |
| ICANN GAC | ICANN Government Advisory Committee |
| IEPG | Internet Engineering and Planning Group |
| IESG | Internet Engineering Steering Group |
| IETF | Internet Engineering Task Force |
| IGF | Internet Governance Forum |
| ISOC | Internet Society |
| ITAC | Internet Technical Advisory Committee |
| ITU | International Telecommunication Union |
| ITU-T | ITU Telecommunication Standardization Sector |
| LACNIC | Latin American and Caribbean Internet Address Registry |
| NANOG | North American Network Operators’ Group |
| NAv6TF | North American IPv6 Task Force |
| NRO | Number Resource Organization |
| NRO EC | NRO Executive Council |
| NRO NC | NRO Number Council |
| OECD | Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development |
| RIPE | Réseaux IP Européens |
| RIPE NCC | RIPE Network Coordination Centre |
| WCIT | World Conference on International Telecommunications |
| WGIG | Working Group on Internet Governance |
| WSIS | World Summit on the Information Society |
| WTSA | World Telecommunication Standardization Assembly |
| WTFP | World Telecommunications Policy Forum |
Technical Terms
| Abbr | Meaning |
|---|---|
| AS | Autonomous System |
| ASN | Autonomous System Number |
| BGP | Border Gateway Protocol |
| CA | Cryptographic Authentication |
| CIDR | Classless Inter-Domain Routing |
| CPS | Certification Practices Statement |
| CRISP | Cross Registry Information Service Protocol |
| DNS | Domain Name System |
| DNSSEC | Domain Name System Security |
| ICMP | Internet Control Message Protocol |
| IN-ADDR | Inverse Addressing |
| IP | Internet Protocol |
| IPv4 | Internet Protocol version 4 |
| IPv6 | Internet Protocol version 6 |
| IRIS | Internet Registry Information Services |
| IRR | Internet Routing Registry |
| IXP | Internet Exchange Point |
| LAN | Local Area Network |
| LSN | Large-Scale NAT |
| NAT-PT | Network Address Translation - Protocol Translation |
| NIC | Network Information Center |
| NOC | Network Operations Center |
| PA | Provider Aggregatable |
| PGP | Pretty Good Privacy |
| PI | Provider Independent |
| ROA | Route Origin Authorization |
| Reg-RWS | Registration RESTful Web Service |
| REST | Representational State Transfer |
| RPKI | Resource Public Key Infrastructure |
| RPSL | Routing Policy Specification Language |
| RWhois | Referral WHOIS |
| SSL | Secure Socket Layer |
| SWIP | Shared WHOIS Project |
| TCP | Transport Control Protocol |
| UDP | User Datagram Protocol |
| ULA | Unique Local Address |
| VLSM | Variable Length Subnet Mask |
| WAN | Wide Area Network |
| Whois-RWS | Whois RESTful Web Service |
| XML | Extensible Markup Language |
| 6 to 4 | IPv4 Tunnel for IPv6 Traffic |