Who owns the Internet?

Posted on June 16, 2007 admin

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Who created the Internet? Who owns it, and How is it regulated?

Ever wonder who owns the internet and how it was created? Whoever created or owns the internet must be very rich right now, He could be richer than Bill Gates of Microsoft, or Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google and many others.

If you search the term “who owns the internet” on search engines, there are about 6 millions results and non of them exactly knows who really owns it. Most of the results simply explains how the internet come about.

Here’s some of the results according to search engine results:

advice.cio.com (PR 7, Alexa 21,708 )

Who owns the Internet? We have a map that shows you. - by Ben Worthen
What is this ball of colors? It is the North American Internet, or more specifically a map of just about every router on the North American backbone, (there are 134,855 of them for those who are counting). The colors represent who each router is registered to. Red is Verizon; blue AT&T; yellow Qwest; green is major backbone players like Level 3 and Sprint Nextel; black is the entire cable industry put together; and gray is everyone else, from small telecommunications companies to large international players who only have a small presence in the U.S. If you click on the map it will take you to much bigger version complete with labels that tell you the address of many of the routers. read more.

webopedia.com (PR 7, Alexa 8,219)

Who Owns the Internet?

No one actually owns the Internet, and no single person or organization controls the Internet in its entirety. More of a concept than an actual tangible entity, the Internet relies on a physical infrastructure that connects networks to other networks. There are many organizations, corporations, governments, schools, private citizens and service providers that all own pieces of the infrastructure, but there is no one body that owns it all. There are, however, organizations that oversee and standardize what happens on the Internet and assign IP addresses and domain names, such as the National Science Foundation, the Internet Engineering Task Force, ICANN, InterNIC and the Internet Architecture Board.

world-information.org (PR 6, Alexa 7,182,790)

Who owns the Internet and who is in charge?
The Internet/Matrix still depends heavily on public infrastructure and there is no dedicated owner of the whole Internet/Matrix, but the networks it consists of are run and owned by corporations and institutions. Access to the Internet is usually provided by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) for a monthly fee. Each network is owned by someone and has a network operation center from where it is centrally controlled, but the Internet/Matrix is not owned by any single authority and has no network operation center of its own. No legal authority determines how and where networks can be connected together, this is something the managers of networks have to agree about. So there is no way to ever gain ultimate control of the Matrix/Internet. read more.

mises.org (PR 7. Alexa 26,547)

Who Owns the Internet? - posted by Tim Swanson
Before you can answer who owns the Internet, you must answer what the Internet is. Is it a jumble of random wires and duct tape? Is it a software packet, a computer, or a router? While some may argue that it is one big snuff collection, in truth it is an amalgamation, an assortment of heterogeneous computer systems with varying capabilities linked together by various protocols. read more.

money.cnn.com (PR 9, Alexa 70 )

The man who owns the Internet – Paul Sloan
(Business 2.0 Magazine) — Kevin Ham leans forward, sits up tall, closes his eyes, and begins to type — into the air. He’s seated along the rear wall of a packed ballroom in Las Vegas’s Venetian Hotel. Up front, an auctioneer is running through a list of Internet domain names, building excitement the same way he might if vintage cars were on the block.
As names come up that interest Ham, he occasionally air-types. It’s the ultimate gut check. Is the name one that people might enter directly into their Web browser, bypassing the search engine box entirely, as Ham wants? Is it better in plural or singular form? If it’s a typo, is it a mistake a lot of people would make? Or does the name, like a stunning beachfront property, just feel like a winner? read more

angelo.edu (PR 7, Alexa 194,267)

Who Owns the Internet? - by Anne Wells Branscomb
Since new Internet technology has opened new frontiers of opportunity, not only in education and entertainment, but in commerce, politics, and the arts, who really owns it, or has the right to control what happens within it? This is perhaps the most challenging legal question before us as we look for American Values in Cyberspace. Who Owns the Internet? The short answer is very simple. Either nobody owns the Internet, or everybody owns the Internet, or something in between. Since nobody knows, I decided that we should start, as a lawyer does, with some definitions.First, what is the Internet? It is a protocol for permitting lots of disparate computer networks with different operating systems, speaking different computer languages, to converse with each other. Stated simply, it is the “death of distance.”
read more

ask.metafilter.com (PR6 Alexa 3,367 )

Who owns the internet? - posted by barakuda
Question : who owns the internet? i’m a complete technology ignoramus with a somewhat instinctive understaning how most things work. can you please humor me and tell me who owns the internet? e.g. why do i have to pay for registering a new domain name, who gets this money and why? who supports the entire internet system and how? who is in control?
Answer: ICANN manages domain names & IP addresses. They license who can handle domain registries/etc.
The internet itself, though, works because a bunch of very large companies have a lot of cable laid down, and they all have peering agreements. These basically say “I’ll let your traffic over my wires if you let my traffic over your wires.” Those large companies form the backbone of the net. From that, 2nd & 3rd level companies will branch out, combine service from 1st level companies, etc, and this will eventually go to the ISPs that you usually use (sometimes a single company will provide multiple steps, although there were originally moves to block this). read more.

computer.howstuffworks.com (PR 7, Alexa 1,372 )

How Internet Infrastructure Works - by Jeff Tyson
One of the greatest things about the Internet is that nobody really owns it. It is a global collection of networks, both big and small. These networks connect together in many different ways to form the single entity that we know as the Internet. In fact, the very name comes from this idea of interconnected networks
Since its beginning in 1969, the Internet has grown from four host computer systems to tens of millions. However, just because nobody owns the Internet, it doesn’t mean it is not monitored and maintained in different ways. The Internet Society, a non-profit group established in 1992, oversees the formation of the policies and protocols that define how we use and interact with the Internet. read more: