* ICANN: Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. Headquartered in Marina Del Rey, California, United States, ICANN is a non-profit corporation that was created on September 18, 1998 in order to oversee a number of Internet-related tasks previously performed directly on behalf of the U.S. government by other organizations, notably the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority IANA. The tasks of ICANN include responsibility for Internet Protocol (IP) address space allocation, protocol identifier assignment, generic (gTLD) and country code Top Level Domain name system management, and root server system management functions. More generically, ICANN is responsible for managing the assignment of domain names and IP addresses. To date, much of its work has concerned the introduction of new generic top-level domains. The technical work of ICANN is referred to as the IANA function. ICANN's other primary function involves helping preserve the operational stability of the Internet; to promote competition; to achieve broad representation of global Internet community; and to develop policies appropriate to its mission through bottom-up, consensus-based processes. On September 29, 2006, ICANN signed a new agreement with the United States Department of Commerce (DOC) that is a step forward towards the full management of the Internet's system of centrally coordinated identifiers through the multi-stakeholder model of consultation that ICANN represents.

* IDN: An internationalized domain name (IDN) is an Internet domain name that contains one or more non-ASCII characters. Such domain names could contain letters with diacritics, as required by many non-English languages, or characters from non-Latin scripts such as Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese or Hindi. However, the standard for domain names does not allow such characters, and much work has gone into finding a way to internationalize domain names into a standard ASCII format, thereby preserving the stability of the domain name system. After much debate and many competing proposals, a system called Internationalizing Domain Names in Applications (IDNA) was adopted as the chosen standard, and has been rolled out in several top level domains. As an example of how IDNA works, suppose the domain to be encoded is Bcher.ch ("Bcher" is German for "books" , and .ch is the country domain of Switzerland). This has two labels, Bcher and ch. The second label is pure ASCII, and so is left unchanged. The first label is processed by Nameprep to give bcher, and then by Punycode to give bcher-kva, and then has xn-- prepended to give xn--bcher-kva. The final domain suitable for use with the DNS is therefore xn--bcher-kva.ch.

* Internet Service Provider (ISP): Typically a small or large business that supplies access to the internet, although an individual person may be equipped to do so. It is common for ISPs to provide web hosting, domain registrations and other services that are related.

* InterNIC: The name given to a project that originated under a cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation (NSF). Under the current agreement with the U.S. Government, InterNIC, Inc., as theInterNIC, provides domain name registration services in ".com", ".net", ".org", and ".edu".

* Link Exchange: Placing a link to another website on your own site in exchange for a return link back. Also known as reciprocal linking.

* Link Popularity: A measure of how "popular" a web page is on the internet as measured by the number of inbound links pointing to your web page. Link popularity is one of the main factors used to help determine search engine rankings.

* mil (.mil): The top level domain designated for United States military entities.

* Name Server: Also called a host (name server). A computer that has both the software and the data (zone file) needed to resolve domain names to Internet Protocol (IP) numbers.

* Name Service (Domain Name Service): Providing individuals or organizations with domain name-to-Internet Protocol (IP) number resolution by maintaining and making available the hardware, software, and data needed to perform this function. Many Internet Service Providers (ISPs) operate name servers and provide their customers with name services when they register a domain name. Most individuals are not in a position to operate a name server on their own and will need to make arrangements for name services with an ISP or some other person or organization.