Who controls the release of public IP's? Do I have any other alternatives besides my ISP, who wants to charge me $10/month for one static IP? Thanks

Public IPs are controlled ultimately by ICANN, which is responsible for allocating IP blocks to the various service providers, who in turn have control of allocating the individual addresses within their own block to their users (you). If you being asked to pay a surcharge for a static IP, it is to cover the fact that you are reducing their ability to share out that IP address. ISPs share each IP address among different users - this is the "contention ratio" - to maximise how many can be logged into a session on the server simultaneously. IOW you are restricting their services to other users, so they charge you for it.

In North America, ARIN. There is a psuedo-regional/continental organization to IP Address allocation for public IPv4 addresses (so China, for example, has APNIC). You don't buy an address right from ARIN, they are provided in large blocks through ISP's and webhosts. You only buy in bulk from ARIN.

Yep, I forgot the mid-step. If you are in the European zone, then it is RIPE.

Just to clarify for the original post, you only buy single or small groups of addresses from your ISP or webhost. In your situation, it has to be your ISP. ICANN is for international coordination of DNS, IP Addresses, and technical things (they have responsibility in these areas). Critical to DNS is a unique registry of IP addresses, so that responsibility has to be included, at least on paper, in the organization. The actual responsibility of allocation/assignment is handled by Regional Internet Registries (RIR's). ARIN (one of four RIR's) is for IP Address assignment in a specific region. ARIN performs IP Address allocation and ICANN agrees and globally supports it. ICANN will not sell you any IP addresses, you have to go to your RIR (Regional Internet Registries) for that. Typically the addresses are resold a second time by a service provider before they reach an end-user. There are limits to buying from an RIR and most end-users find them inconvenient and unnecessary. In the scheme of things, the U.S. Department of Congress contracted to ICANN (lots of other things happened before that). ICANN was an attempt to unite the technical needs of the Internet with policy management. ICANN and RIR's interact through the Address Supporting Organization (AOS), an group created under ICANN control in which the RIR's are heavily involved with (in operation and policy). ARIN was developed and stabilized earlier than ICANN because numbers are a lot less political than domains (especially in global terms). ICANN spends virtually all its time playing with domains (with some controversial dealings). The DNS administration is a little complicated. In Summary, go to an RIR for IP addresses and ICANN for domains. Both sell their resources to registered organizations, which can in turn sell to resellers.