ICANN
In August 2012, DiaMatrix, the holding company for domains.co.za became only the 2nd company in South Africa and the 6th in Africa to receive the International ICANN accreditation. Becoming ICANN accredited is a lengthy and detailed process involving, but not limited to, administrative and technical accreditations and proficiencies.
To access information on the internet, you need to have the Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) of the site that you are looking for. These website addresses contain unique domain names, which used to be coordinated and monitored by the US government.
The proposed privatisation of this was accepted by a non-profit Internet and DNS management corporation that had a global board of directors. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) was established in September 1998 and is based in Los Angeles, USA.
ICANN oversees the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) and is responsible for the coordination of the internet’s unique identifiers, and a host of other functions including the Internet Protocol address spaces (IPv4 and IPv6) and the management of Top-Level Domain Name Space (DNS).
ICANN controls technical operations, whilst also defining policy development related to maintaining and supporting the DNS infrastructure on a global basis. ICANN is introducing new generic top-level domains, referred to as TLDs.
Wikipedia sums it up well, by stating that "ICANN's primary principles of operation have been described as helping preserve the operational stability of the Internet; to promote competition; to achieve broad representation of the global Internet community; and to develop policies appropriate to its mission through bottom-up, consensus-based processes."
For further ICANN information, please refer to their comprehensive website.