We are so accustomed to using the internet that it's a part of our lives, and we don't stop to ask ourselves some questions about it. However, when we start thinking about the internet, questions arise such as: How does it work? Can it be turned off? Who invented it? Who owns the internet?
To address these intriguing questions, let's travel back to the 1970s, where ARPANET was formally introduced, a project that allowed sharing information between computers at MIT, Harvard, Stanford, and 23 other scientific institutions.
This was a significant contribution to communication, and scientists were excited about such advancement. As it continued to grow, other networks like TELENET, USENET, BITNET, or EUNET emerged, but ARPANET remained the standard. In 1982, the TCP/IP protocol was implemented, giving birth to the internet.
In the 1980s, with the rise of email (Ray Tomlinson) and the commercialization of computers, networks collapsed due to the number of users and information being shared. This led to the emergence of the World Wide Web (WWW), a network of sites that could be searched and displayed using the Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP).
Perhaps you might be interested in "30 years of the first web page."
The concept was developed by Tim Berners-Lee and scientists at CERN in Geneva, who were interested in displaying documentation on the internet. They designed a browser that was free at the time and widely used by the scientific community.
Surely, you might not have known these facts, or perhaps you did. But let's continue with the big question: who controls the internet, who are its masters?
As we learned from this brief historical overview of the internet, we see that it has grown as a collection of contributions over time and around the world. This shows us that it's a collaborative effort, and yes, the internet, a network of networks, doesn't really have a single owner, so to speak. It is present in different countries, each with its own legislation and restrictions if desired. Additionally, information is stored on servers in different countries, each with its own policies. Thus, we could assert that there is no way to shut down the internet worldwide because of its multiple connections and physical networks, making it practically impossible to disable it for the entire planet.
What we can talk about is that there are regulators who have power and authority in areas where the internet is used, such as the government of your country, when viewed locally. But we can also talk about regions like the control and power that the United States may have over some areas. For example, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) was subject to the US government until 2016, when it was recognized as an autonomous entity.
So, we are talking about there not being a single owner but autonomous entities around the world that can intervene in the control and administration of the internet in each territory by applying their own policies and even restricting partial or total access to the internet.
