IANA is a standards organization owned by ICANN responsible for global allocation of IP Addresses and ASNs, management of DNS root zones, and protocol assignments. In regards to IP number management, IANA is primarily responsible for allocating a pool of unallocated IP blocks to RIRs according to the global policy to ensure fair allocation of IP addresses across the regions.

When you connect to the Internet, your ISP assigns an IP address that you can use to communicate with the rest of the world. Hiding your IP address blocks others from detecting your geolocation, access websites blocked by your government, and work around a banned IP address. However, hiding an IP address does not block advertisers from tracking you or stay anonymous online.

The Internet is a part of our lives, and can no longer live without it. We use it to check our daily weather forecast, read morning news briefs, trade stocks, and listen to our favorite music on Spotify. What makes the World Wide Web possible is domain names, and ICANN is the organization that manages them.

Anyone who needs IP addresses can register them through RIRs (ARIN for North America), and the ownership information will become public. An IP address is a public information anyone can look up, and it can be used to find the geolocation of a host.

An Autonomous System (AS) is a large network that has a common routing policy used to serve a set of IP prefixes. An AS is assigned to a single organization and is connected to multiple ASes to route IP packets in a redundant manner. An AS is assigned a 16-bit or 32-bit number (ASN) by the IANA to Internet Service Providers (ISPs), governments, universities, and enterprises.

A RIR (or Regional Internet Registry) is a nonprofit organization that allocates Internet Numbers which is comprised of IPv4 Addresses, IPv6 Addresses, and ASN (Autonomous System Numbers) within their respective regions. An IP address is a globally unique number that is assigned to computing devices to communicate with each other within a network (or Internet). ASN is a group of one or more IP prefixes that are used to define routing policy. With IP Address and ASN, IP packets are routed from one IP address to another regardless of where they are located within the world. There are 5 RIRs in the world, and their serving regions:

Before we can discuss CIDR (Classless Inter-Domain Routing), we need to understand what IP address is, how it is divided (subnetting), and what versions of IP addresses are available. Currently, there are IPv4 (version 4) and IPv6 (version 6) addresses. IPv4 was introduced in 1980, and it is a 32-bit number having a total of about 4.3 million addresses. With the prosperity of the Internet and smart devices joining the network, 4.3 million IP addresses weren't enough to connect all devices available worldwide, and hence 128-bit IPv6 address was invented in 1998. For each computer, smartphone, tablet, and IoT devices joining the Internet, the number of IP addresses available within IPv4 wasn't enough to connect all devices.

When you're connected to a network, your computer or smart device will obtain an IP address either from your ISP or your router. There are 2 ways how you can assign an IP address to your device: (1) dynamically via DHCP or (2) statically by manually assigning an IP address yourself. In either case, you must use the IP address that is provided to you by your ISP, or the IP range you allocated yourself within your private space (i.e. private IP address).

To be online, each and every computing device must have an IP Address to communicate with other devices over the Internet. An IP Address is assigned to a computing device via an DHCP server or manually assigned a static IP address. Computing devices include desktop PCs, Macs, Servers, Smartphones, Tablets, Amazon Echos, Routers, and any other smart devices that are connected to the Internet.

An IP Address is a unique address assigned to a computing device such as a computer, tablet, or smartphone. An IP address is analogous to the postal address of a house (or the phone number of your smartphone), where two houses cannot have the same address as a mailman will be confused about where to deliver the mail.