The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) develops and promotes Internet standards, cooperating closely with the W3C and ISO/IEC standards bodies and dealing in particular with standards of the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP).[1][2] It is an open standards organization, with no formal membership or membership requirements. It started out as a US federal government organization, and today it operates as a non-commercial not-for-profit non-governmental organization. All participants and managers are volunteers, though their work is usually funded by their employers or sponsors.