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 |