Wikipedia
Prior to globalization of the Internet, its assignment of domain names was administered within the research and academic communities, through the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). As the Internet grew to a global service, in the 1990s, there was increasing pressure to add more "generic" top-level domain names, beyond the initial set, such as .com and .org and the two-letter country codes. Extensive debate within the Internet operational community did not resolve this. Finally, a composite group was formed, to create a proposal for the enhancement. The International Ad Hoc Committee (IAHC) was composed of members named by a variety of Internet and International sponsoring organizations.
The IAHC had a limited charter: "The IAHC is an international multi-organization effort for specifying and implementing policies and procedures relating to iTLD." ('international' TLDs are now called 'generic' TLDs, or gTLDs.)