It MUST be controlled by the standard and not become a prerogative of
every programmer wishing to publish new definitions.
Absolutely not. That is not how the Internet was built, really it
is not.
The Internet was not meant to be a Stalinist environment where every
change was the result of central planning. That model was tried with
OSI.
The idea of using namespaces in place of registered identifiers
was exactly to escape political control. At the time I suggested it
the people designing PICS were planning to have an IANA like registry
of censorship schemes. I thought it would be better if anyone who wanted
could become a censor and people could chose their own censorship
scheme. It had the desired effect.
XML adopted the same architecture because they understood that
a central registry of XML schemas was bound to fail.
IANA was not created to exercise political control, that was not
an intended function (although it has been used as such). The
function of IANA is simply to avoid collisions and avoid exhausting
the number space.
Phill