Who Owns the Internet?

The Internet.

The Internet is a cooperative, public and self-sustaining facility available to hundreds of millions of people worldwide. It tears down boundaries everywhere. For many Internet users, Internet or sometimes called simply "the Net" is the fastest and easiest way to gather information and communicate with others.

The Internet was first known as the ARPANet, conceived by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the U.S. government in 1969. The initial aim was to create a network that would allow users of a research computer at one university to be able to "talk to" research computers at other universities. The internet is basicly a worlwide system of computer networks. It is a network of networks in which users at any accesssible computer can get information from any other computer.

Who's Regulates The Net?

Almost ANYTHING can be found on the Internet and all of this are available at our fingertips. So the question that most Internet users will ask is, WHO OWNS IT?

No one actually owns the Internet, and no single person or organization controls the Internet in its entirety. There are many governments, corporations, organizations, schools, private citizens and service providers that all own pieces of the infrastructure, but there is no one body that owns it all.

There are, however, organizations that standardize and regulates what happens on the Internet and assign IP addresses and domain names, such as the ICANN, InterNIC, the Internet Architecture Board, National Science Foundation and the Internet Engineering Task Force.

Internet Censorship? Yay or Nay?

Since the existence of the internet, there have been countless attempts to censor it. Most users believe that the Internet should be a place where all information is allowed to flow freely and available to everyone. However, most countries and governments do not share this belief. I, as an Internet user, support this, but not entirely. Why? These are the reasons.

Internet censorship falls into three categories; security, social norms and the most controversial, politics.

Out of all these categories, I do not support censorship for political reasons. This is always considered problematic in countries where rulers are trying to hold on to power in which they do not have free and fair elections. The censorship is usually to make sure that information that could be a threat to the ruling powers does not get seen by the people. This is really a burden to minority groups that are trying to free the people from government oppression.

The next category is to protect social norms. This type of censorship gets support from all over the world including me, like laws against child pornography or hate speech. For some countries, sites that are seen to promote homosexuality are often censored because they differ from the predominant religion.

The third category is for security reasons. Sites that belong to terrorist groups and extremists are blocked. Making sure that sensitive yet dangerous information is not made available to public. Clearly, this type of information can be a threat to national security and the safety of the people as well.

The Internet is an open sea and obviously that most forms of censorship can fall into more than one category. Let's hope that these censorships are not abused by the authorities.

Written by,
Muhammad Muzzammil Bin Jamaludin
1121115343