Computer Science Principles The Internet - 02 Internet Basics - 02 Who manages the Internet

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So with all this technology that is constantly changing and evolving, who actually controls the Internet?

The simple answer is no one. There isn't a CEO or president of the Internet. In fact, no one person, company, or government runs the Internet.

Instead a combination of government agencies, international groups, and companies in the private sector collaborate together to keep the fundamental technologies of the Internet working. These groups form the rules that define how all of the different systems work.

The Internet is formed of multiple networks that all conform to the standard protocols of the Internet known as TCPIP. Some of these networks are owned by private companies, like your internet service provider, universities, cell phone companies and others.

But all these different networks need to have a way to tell one from the other. It's like having a bunch of airports. Each airport is run by a different group of people. You need to have a way to know that if you're going from airport A to airport C that the pilot knows where they're going, and that airport you are going to knows to expect your arrival.

In the case of airports an agency known as the International Air Transport Association or IATA developed a system of three-letter codes that every airport throughout the world has adopted. So if you're at SFO and your bags and ticket have JFK on it, it knows that you are headed to New York City, and every airport is aware of each other.

The same happens on the Internet, but instead of airports, there are networks. Another agency called ICANN, which stands for Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, does the same thing. It manages the names or identifiers that are part of the Internet, like URLs, or Uniform Resource Locators.

These are the phrases you know for websites. Portions of a website name called a domain are managed by ICANN. For example, a government website in the US typically end with .gov. Commercial sites end in .com. International sites have their own designation.

For example, take the website for Google. In the US, it is google.com, but in Canada it is google.ca. Amazon in the UK is amazon.co.uk.

That doesn't mean the Internet is free of conflict and politics. It just happens differently than what we think of in the government.

Take something like HTML. HTML is the language that web pages and web browsers use to communicate and structure information. There are a few international agencies called standards bodies, like the W3C and WHATWG, that are groups of people that work to develop a universally adopted set of rules called standards that software and hardware companies can rely on to build products that will work with the technology.

Many of these standards bodies have individuals from private companies, and they work to add new features to languages and rules of the Internet. If one company really wants to add in a new feature to their browser but it isn't part of the standard rules, they might add the feature in and tell their users and fans that this awesome new feature is available to them. If they like it, they might demand that other browsers adopt it and then push for it to become a standard.

But on the other side, some companies might want to push their solution over another. So you have a situation where the makers of browsers have a lot of power in determining what goes into the rules, known as a specification or spec.

So while there's no leader of the Internet, through international agencies and standards bodies, the world generally works together to ensure that the Internet works. This is all through the base technology and protocols that define how the Internet works, and these organizations evolve and adapt over time.