Who owns the internet

This is a huge question

For starters the internet isn’t a single thing that’s solely owned by an organization or company. It’s a massive series of interconnected networks owned by a variety of organizations and companies.

On top of that there are a series of services and regulatory agencies controlling key aspects of it. These services are also made to be redundant to prevent outages.

The internet is a decentralized network in many ways and parts of it are distributed for redundancy.

Presumably, the dot highlighted in red represents your local network and the dots around it are computers on your network. Each arm of the decentralized snowflake represents local networks and sometimes (like in the top one) two local networks are connected in a WAN configuration.

This question speaks to who owns the blue circle in the middle? I’ll touch on that in this answer.

The history

It helps to have a brief understanding of the background of the internet to understand it’s current structure (or lack thereof).

The Internet was started in the 1960s and 1970s by researchers as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) within the US Department of Defense. The goal was to get two computer systems talking to each other over a distance. This was first done with a computer system in Menlo Park California and a computer system at UCLA. 15 states soon added their own server connections to this effort, which was known at the time as ARPANET (Advanced research projects network) rather than the internet.

Protocols

In order to facilitate communications between disparate systems and platforms a set of standard protocols needed to be developed. Otherwise it would be like an English person trying to speak to a French person over the phone with neither of them knowing the other’s language. A tool known as a Request For Comments (RFC's) was developed for researchers to collaborate on these standards and propositions.

In 1974, the Specification of Internet Transmission Control Program (RFC 675) specified the protocol for TCP and also coined the term “Internet” for the first time. TCP/IP was standardized in 1982 allowing the internet to grow.

Expansion

In 1981, the National Science Foundation expanded access to ARPANET by funding the Computer Science Network.

In 1986, the National Science Foundation Network (NSFNET) provided access to supercomputer sites across the US.

In 1989, NSFNET took over the backbone services of the internet from ARPANET

By the early 1990s commercial Internet Service Providers (ISPs) began to allow public access to the networks.

The internet has exploded since then.

Current Structure

This isn’t an official map and there isn’t a solid definition of various tiers of the internet, but generally speaking, the Tier 1 network layer functions as the backbone of the internet.

This was largely built on pre-existing telephone infrastructure in the United States and other first world countries. The tier 1 networks have “peering agreements” between each other allowing communications between the various Regional Tier 1 Networks.

Going up the various internet tiers, there are other agreements between the ISPs until the end nodes of the internet, the home and business users.

By 1995, the private Tier 1 networks supplanted the original NSFNET backbone of the internet and NSFNET was officially decommissioned.

Privatization of the internet backbone in the US

The basic infrastructure is “owned” by these tiers of networks that provide access to one another. A list of tier 1 networks in the US is in the link above, under the picture.

Note: it’s very possible for several higher tier network providers to peer with each other by passing the Tier 1 networks. The User layer can also interlink their own networks bypassing all the tiers if they want to. For access to the entirety of the internet and it’s information, this is highly impractical.

Every country has it’s own regional tier 1 layers and are regulated by rules within their own country. China, for example, controls all traffic going into or out of the country through government controls.

Undersea fiber map[1]

Protocol regulation

To make the internet an actual usable construct by the population, several services need to exist and be regulated.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) was formed in 1998. It’s job is to manage and track IP address allocation and to manage Domain Name Services globally.

Up until that point this function was performed by one man, Jon Postel. ICANN is a California based non-profit corporation.

ICANN’s job is to allocate publically routable IP addresses to ISPs and track this allocation. Without these IP address, internet communication isn’t possible. If these addresses are poorly managed there could be duplication, with duplication, routing is not possible and arbitrary conflict resolution must take place within routers.

Additionally, ICANN manages Domain Names. When you try to go to a quora you’ll put in `www.quora.com` into the browser. This is easy for you to remember, a lot easier than `192.229.162.211`. DNS enables users simple access to servers, it allows companies to easily publish their data and for customers and employees to communicate with each other, and it allows for simple redundancy through multiple IP addresses being assigned to single DNS records.

While DNS is also distributed, the root public DNS servers are stored by ICANN. While it’s possible that if ICANN root DNS servers went down, no one would notice due to the distribution of the information, it would be near impossible for new domain names to be registered.

It could be argued that ICANN is one of the biggest points of failure on the internet, thus making it the owner, but there’s a lot of nuance in that answer.

Additionally, if one of the tiered network providers decided to tear up their peering agreements it could cause serious issues for millions of people. This has happened in the past: Level 3 Releases Statement to Clarify Issues in Comcast/Level 3 Interconnection Dispute. Giving them all real power.

There are movements to make the Internet a utility within the us[2] making it similar to power lines and water lines. It can stay privatized, but it will be much more closely regulated by the government.

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While it’s true to say that “no one owns the internet” it’s a bit of an oversimplification of a very complicated structure. No single group owns the entire thing, but a majority of the traffic on the internet is passed through a small group of providers, and there is a lot of power in the hands of a single organization.