Who Owns the Internet?

Who owns the Internet? The Internet is a public collaboration. No one person, organization, or group of organizations owns it. As it grew from a small network of four computers used in research for the United States defense establishment into a public system comprised of hundreds of commercial telecommunication networks of all sizes, thousands of institutions, hundreds of thousands of businesses, and millions of individual users. How is it all kept together? Several organizations each participate in maintaining some kind of order to the Net. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is a group of working members from many corporations and competent individuals that collaborate on maintaining the TCP/IP and the underlying Internet protocol. The Web's protocol inventor is Tim Berners-Lee who co-founded The World Wide Web Consortium who foster the development of Hypertext Transport Protocol (HTTP) that your Web browser and all Web servers use, plus Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), and other Web standards. All the Net's addresses and domain names are controlled by an organization called InterNIC. The Internet continues to be influenced by governments around the world. Some governments determine how accessible the Internet is and who can access it. Democratic goverments are concerned about defense security, children's access to pornography, and the regulation of and provision of fair access to telecommunications infrastructure.

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