Who owns the Internet?

Who owns the Internet?

There is no dedicated owner of the whole Internet.

There are thousands, and millions, and billions of people who own internet. Each network is owned by someone and has a network operation center from where it is centrally controlled. However, it is not owned by any single authority and has no network operation center of its own.

Today, Internet plays the most vital role in day-to-day activity. The pieces of the infrastructure is owned by many organizations, corporations, governments, schools, private citizens and service providers, but there is no one body who rules or owns it all. There are different companies who oversee and standardize what happens on the Internet. It is the responsibility of some of the organizations to assign IP addresses and domain names, such as National Science Foundation, the Internet Engineering Task, Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, etc.

So, who actually owns the internet? There are just two answers to this question:

• Nobody
• Lots of people

The internet is basically like a telephone system, nobody owns it. The Internet works because of a system of rules called protocols. By following these protocols, computers can send information across the network to other computers. If there were no protocols, then there'd be no guarantee that the information sent from one computer could be understood by another, or that it'd even reach the right destination.