Who "owns" the internet?

May 10, 2017 10:16 AM

Asking for a friend, who is interested in the question of who "owns" (or controls) the internet. If there are other helpful ways to frame or think about this question, that would be valuable, too. Any resources on this topic are welcome. Thank you.
posted by DavidNYC to Computers & Internet (18 answers total)

"The internet" isn't a single thing that is owned. It's like asking who owns land (not a particular bit of land, but land in general. It's owned by a lot of different people and some governments).

You own your own local area network. You company owns the one you use at work. Your ISP owns the cable that comes out of your house. There are various intermediate networks and then you hit the "Tier 1" networks, which are the big kahunas and consist of some names you've heard of, like AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint, and some names you might not have heard of, like Level 3 Communications and GTT.
posted by It's Never Lurgi at 10:31 AM on May 10, 2017 [11 favorites]

ICANN is the organization that keeps track of who can claim "ownership" of metafilter.com (or google.com, or whitehouse.gov, etc), and is probably the most straightforward answer to the question.
posted by Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug at 10:37 AM on May 10, 2017 [3 favorites]

Depending how old your friend is and how much they know about the internet, it might be good to make a sort of metaphor to something like the POTS system (plain old telephone) or the highway system. I teach older people how to use computers and some of these simple metaphors work for me. The internet is just a bunch of connected computers that share files and programs because they agree on certain languages of how to talk to one another. But depending on what your friend wants to know different things may be more useful.

- The phone system metaphor works for me when explaining URLs. So like you need to pay a company to get a phone number to be able to use the phone system. You can pay a company (a domain registrar) to get a web address which they will point at your files. You'd also need to pay (or get for free) web space to put those files. Or places like facebook, wordpress, imgur, wikipedia can serve as a space for certain kinds of files. So Toyota pays for the web address www.toyota.com and also for the computer that the files are on that make up that web space.
- The highway system works when explaining the cabling and other connectivity. Every road is connected to every other road. Every computer is connected to every other computer and if you want to connect to that network you need to use someone's connection or pay someone to get a connection (i.e. an ISP, internet service provider)
- The governance structure is a bit handwavey but big corporations own the bulk of the ISPs and domain registrars in the US. In some companies the infrastructure is owned by the government which is why you can see some countries "banning" things on the internet. Otherwise, the rules are mostly made by the ISPs (after a few high level rules that go above that). So if you see something you don't like on a website, the first thing to do is talk to that website, there are no "internet cops" who police things in general it's mostly up to the people who host content and the people who sell connectivity.

The internet Society has a decent overview of some of this stuff from a more technical standpoint. Here's another good overview from people who do basic tech education.
posted by jessamyn at 10:38 AM on May 10, 2017 [5 favorites]

Actually, my last comment is not 100% true. Groups like IANA and ARIN are also involved.

So generally the answer is "a bunch of non-profit groups control the internet, except for when the US Government tries to throw its weight around"
posted by Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug at 10:39 AM on May 10, 2017 [2 favorites]

IANA, ARIN, ICANN, and like organizations do not own the internet. They do not control the internet either. They are the internet equivalent of a Land Registry Office. They will tell you what your address is. They will let you apply to have a new and different address. But they do not own the land, they do not control the land, they do not have a say in what happens on the land, beyond maybe some zoning considerations.
posted by Jairus at 10:47 AM on May 10, 2017 [1 favorite]

IANA, ARIN, ICANN, and like organizations do not own the internet. They do not control the internet either.

Eh. They're the only game in town, which to me is very effective control over what general public would consider the internet. I can run my own server, I can buy my own cable to connect in with upper tier ISPs so your house has a line in to me, but if I don't sign up with ARIN, I won't have an ASN or address space allocation for anyone to talk to me. If I don't register a domain with ICANN, my email addresses won't be very catchy when everything is NSAID@192.168.1.1.
posted by Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug at 10:53 AM on May 10, 2017

If you don't register with the land registry office you can't get mail either, but that doesn't mean it owns your house.
posted by Jairus at 10:57 AM on May 10, 2017

The global telecom companies own the internet in pieces large and small.

Formal and informal bodies of senior engineers of the global telecom companies and telecom equipment companies, with some help from academic EEs and computer scientists, work together to set the standards whereby the internet actually works.

ICANN and its peer organizations decide who controls domains and sub-domains.

The US, China, Japan, Britain and the EU have significant regulatory authority to set boundaries around the foregoing, but generally speaking are pretty hands off in using that power. Other countries theoretically have the same powers but are sharply limited in how they can exercise them -- they have to take the internet more or less as given to them by the major powers.
posted by MattD at 11:16 AM on May 10, 2017

Asking for a friend, who is interested in the question of who "owns" (or controls) the internet.

The answer to this question is actually, "No."

I've gotten trapped into this sort of thing before, where someone is asking for a simple answer to a complex question. Any analogy or simplification is going to be wrong. It's a really complex issue and needs to be narrowed or reframed before you can answer it. The internet is a concept, not a single physical entity, and no one group or individual owns it.

The infrastructure of the internet is owned by many different entities, including backbone and last mile ISPs, which also make use of public funds and privileges, which should mean that the public also owns the internet. Ahem.

Control over the structure of the internet--DNS and such--is 'owned' by organizations such as ICANN.

Control over the content is owned by the individual content providers.

Governments certainly have a hand, if you want to argue that that implies ownership.

Oh, man, remember that time I said I've gotten trapped into trying to give simple answers to inherently complex questions?

Ask your friend what the internet is. That might be a place to start.
posted by ernielundquist at 11:50 AM on May 10, 2017 [5 favorites]

Previously, if you're wondering about who controls and gets paid for things like Internet addresses and domain names - like, why do I have to pay someone to own mylastname.com, who is that someone who gets paid, and who says they're the ones who get paid?
posted by mistersix at 12:03 PM on May 10, 2017

It's Never Lurgi: ""The internet" isn't a single thing that is owned. It's like asking who owns land (not a particular bit of land, but land in general. It's owned by a lot of different people and some governments)."

Yes, of course, but asking "who owns land" can still be a valuable question in the abstract—and indeed, you answered it!
posted by Conrad Cornelius o'Donald o'Dell at 12:28 PM on May 10, 2017

Response by poster: ernielundquist: "I've gotten trapped into this sort of thing before, where someone is asking for a simple answer to a complex question. Any analogy or simplification is going to be wrong. It's a really complex issue and needs to be narrowed or reframed before you can answer it. The internet is a concept, not a single physical entity, and no one group or individual owns it. "

To be clear, my friend is not looking for simple answers to a complex question. He is looking for complex answers to a complex question. He is aware of and appreciates the fact that the internet is complex thing that is as much idea as physical reality. Asking about "ownership" does not presume that there is a single owner (and it's also why I put the word "owns" in quotation marks in the original question).

And your answers are quite excellent!
posted by DavidNYC at 12:38 PM on May 10, 2017

Hi. I work for a big tech company and have worked for a bunch of ISPs.

In the strictest sense, nobody owns the internet. It's an emergent phenomena that's created by linking together many private networks. It's a network of networks.

In the sense of 'rules', there are a bunch of non-profit organizations who set the standards for the communications protocols that link those networks together, and determine how the applications on it talk to each other. There's a TCP standard, an HTML standard, etc.

Then there are organizations, as people said above that control the allocation of ip addresses and domain names.

Lastly, there are many large corporations who, while they down own 'the internet', own a significant part of it. Comcast and Verizon have a near monopoly between them on broadband internet access in the US. Google and Facebook control a vast amount of internet traffic between them. Amazon and Google own a big chunk of the data centers that host the servers that are behind most websites. A few phone companies control mobile access.. None of those companies own the entire internet, but they are certainly fulcrums that people can use to exert influence. The situation is even fuzzier in countries where the ISP's are state-owned, in which case it can probably be said that the government 'owns' the internet, for all intents and purposes.
posted by empath at 12:41 PM on May 10, 2017 [3 favorites]

The Internet itself is the carrier - the wires, cables, fibers, routers, servers, etc. that carry the information for the World Wide Web, email, FTP, usenet, messaging, and other services. Like landline or mobile phone service, you pay somebody for the ability to connect and to send and receive data. There re agencies in the US and globally, who agree on and implement the shared standards that make the system work all over the world.

When you go to a web page, your computer uses the Internet to request files from a server, and your browser displays the data. Somebody owns the server and somebody owns the content. Mathowie started and owns Metafilter. Metafilter states "All posts are © their original authors." Other sites have different copyright setup.

I've worked with new Web users, and they often want to have a high level of understanding how the whole system works. Like cars/ road systems/ traffic laws or phones/ landlines/ cell networks, the complexity of the system can be a distraction from how to use it effectively. If somebody wants to really understand the Internet, go to the Library, where there are tons of interesting books, and reference librarians to help find them, or start googling.
posted by theora55 at 2:01 PM on May 10, 2017

The Internet was developed in stages and components by different people and organizations. The World Wide Web, which is all the https:// and www.this.com pages, was invented by a scientist named Tim Berners-Lee.
posted by theora55 at 2:05 PM on May 10, 2017

Any discussion of who owns the internet wouldn't be complete without mention of the Key Holders. Not that they own the Internet or would claim that they do, but they're an important part of its governance structure.

Governance of, rather than ownership of, the internet might be a closer approximation to the information your friend is seeking.
posted by jacquilynne at 2:44 PM on May 10, 2017 [1 favorite]

Everybody owns their own bit of the Internet. As was said above, all it really is is a network of networks. Similarly to how your city owns the road leading to your house, a county might own roads between some cities, and states own the larger highways, you own your network, your ISP owns the network you use to get to the larger ISPs, and those global providers own the networks that your ISP uses to talk to other smaller ISPs.

Of course, there are shortcuts in many cases. Google, for example, will peer (connect directly with) just about anybody who sinks a decent amount of traffic from their network, so they can avoid paying Level3, Verizon, at&t, et al to get to your ISP. It's sort of like taking a back road instead of the main highway. Except that all this stuff is privately owned rather than run by the government, aside from a few municipal broadband projects that act as consumer ISPs.
posted by wierdo at 3:33 PM on May 10, 2017

Your friend might be interested to read The Master Switch by Tim Wu.

Wu describes the internet as the latest in a long line of discoveries (radio and the telephone were others), which starts out as an exciting, chaotic opportunity and free sharing, and eventually comes under corporate control.

According to Wu the battle to monopolise the internet is ongoing, but right now the two major contenders are AT&T and Google- AT&T owns the wires the internet operates through, and Google owns the users through our data. Very interesting (and a bit depressing).
posted by Dwardles at 7:24 AM on May 11, 2017