Who controls the internet?

I was just curious to hear from any present day online "Marketeers"

We all know the value of having your lion's share of search engine traffic (seo). With our marketing, advertising, seo , vem (Visitor Education Management) techniques do we stop to think that the internet is growing a face? I mean, when you ask yourself a simple question like "Who controls the internet?"...

Cheers,

M

internet is controlled by all. No one owns or regulates it.

ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) controls the Internet.

Internet Standards are controlled by IETF (The Internet Engineering Task Force) They manage the RFCs (Request for Comment). These are the standards for the Internet Protocols (Language) used on the Internet.

The RFCs are standards that mus be followed by every vendor providing hardware or software used on the Internet. Even the big vendors like Microsoft or Cisco can not do anything they want. If there were no one regulating this, the Internet would fail as each vendor would use their own proprietary language to communicate and similar equipment from rival companies would not work.

As an example, RFC 2821 regulates SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol), the language email servers use to transfer email between servers. If this were not standardized, email would not work.

Nobody completely controls it.

There are lots of organizations that control major parts of it ... for instance, the Chinese government controls packet access to the majority of the Chinese citizenry (which is obviously a HUGE number of people).

The majority of computers accessing the Internet are (God help us) using Microsoft products.

The majority of routers routing packets were created by Cisco.

Major pathways are owned and operated by large telecom companies such as Verizon, Sprint, etc.

The thing is, if any single component starts to become hostile, then people will simply find a way around it. For instance, there are all kinds of packet-paths into China that allow people in-the-know there to access information that their government forbids them to see.

Similarly, if Microsoft decided to impose some sort of draconian policy in its browser, people would simply switch to some other (such as Firefox).

One of the most basic premises behind the original DARPA conception was that it would be self-repairing. That is, packets would try to take the best path from source to destination ... and if that path wasn't available, they would take another.

This means that if some large telecom decides to shut down, the result will be that traffic gets shifted elsewhere. The Internet may slow down a lot to some, but it will continue to operate, and of course companies will get ticked off at the performance and start adding their own equipment to it to speed it up.

If you define "control" as the ability to the "turn off", it would be pretty hard to turn off right now. Even if the US were to lose all of its power, there would be Internet connectivity in other parts of the world. And of course, Satellite communication goes merrily on.

If you're looking for a short answer: Nobody.

There are all kinds of organizations that talk about extending and replacing protocols that the Internet uses ... but their policies aren't enforced by laws. People adopt them if they feel it is in their best interest.

This can be bad too - this has prevented any wide adoption of IPV6 or standard encryption technology - but it does make the thing far more robust.

What an extraordinary question!! I bet it's Santa..

Big Brother is watching you. And he controls your internet.

your internet provider?

its a battle between yahoo and google

Google owns the net.

I think it is not "controlled" is was just established and now works and there is no one controlling the internet.

your mom owns the internet cause of her fat @$$!

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