Reference record for OID 2.16.840

For more information on how to register an organization name, see ANSI Organization Name Registration.

There is a second US branch of the OID tree, {iso(1) member-body(16) us(840)}; some organizations are listed there, but new registrations are made under the 2.16.840 arc.

From Chapter 5 "Names and addresses" of the book "Open Systems Networking. TCP/IP and OSI" (1993) by D.M. Piscitello and A.L. Chapin:
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ANSI operates a registration authority that assigns organization names in two forms:

• an alphanumeric form, which may consist of 1 to 100 characters chosen from a specified character set (defined as registration number 102, the Teletex Set of Primary Graphic Characters, of the ISO International Register of Character Sets to Be Used with Escape Sequences, plus the space character), and
  
• a numeric form, which consists of a positive decimal integer greater than or equal to 113,527 and less than 16 million.
  

The numeric form may be obtained with or without a corresponding alphanumeric form is always accompanied by (and in the register, associated with) a numeric form.

Note: Many people have wondered why ANSI decided to begin the assignment of numeric organization names at the nonintuitive value "113,527," which is not, among other things, a power of 2 (or any other interesting number). Realizing that they had to specify some value as the starting point (and hoping to avoid conferring any special cachet on the recipients of the first few numbers by starting at, say "1"), the members of the U.S. registration authority committee were about to pick a "logical" number ("1,000," perhaps, or "2,048") when Jack Veenstra, the Chairman of the committee, shouted "113,527!" -- which was promptly dubbed the "Veenstra constant" and written into the registration authority procedures. Later, the members of the committee arranged for AT&T (Veenstra's employer) to receive the numeric organization name "113,527" in Jack's honor.

[...] Until [1991], the U.S. name-registration authority conducted its business under the {iso(1) member-body(2) us(840)} arc, registering names for ANSI standards, private organizations with U.S. national standing, and the names of U.S. states and "state equivalents." In 1991, however, changes in the registration authority procedures standard ISO/IEC 9834 | Rec. ITU-T X.660 invalidated this procedure; they required that private organization names with national standing be registered under {joint-iso-itu-t(2) country(16) us(840)} arc. This had two immediate, significant consequences: organization names already registered under the {1 2 840} arc were suddenly "homeless", and policy control over the assignment names -- previously vested solely in ANSI under the old rules -- became the joint responsibility of ANSI and the U.S. Department of State (which is the official US representative in the ITU-T arena).

The existing register of private organization names will move, intact, from the {1 2 840} arc to the {2 16 840 1} arc, which will not invalidate existing names (such as organization identifiers and application entity titles) that may already have been constructed using the {1 2 840} prefix; in effect, two equivalent prefixes will exist (in perpetuity) for currently registered organization names. New registrations will be made only under the new {2 16 840 1} arc, and organizations possessed of an "old" registration will be encouraged (but not required) to construct no new identifiers under the {1 2 840} arc.

[...] Since the rule change covers only "private organization names with national standing," the existing mechanism for registering the names of American national standards under the {1 2 840} arc is unaffected and will remain in place.
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