Page 4: Who’s In Charge of the Internet?
Unit 4, Lab 1, Page 4
BH: What happened to Snowden’s picture?
- We agreed as a team to remove it. –MF, 3/25/19
Could we please agree as a team to put it back?
Wait, now even the text is gone! The whole story about NSF control over the net has disappeared. This is not okay.
- Is it not in the yellowbox? If not, we must have cut or moved it last summer (or before) as it pre-dates the August 29 move in the commit history. We can talk about it, of course. –MF, 5/31/20
On this page, you will learn about the communities of people who control how the Internet works.
Some people think that nobody’s in charge of the Internet—that everyone just cooperates freely with no central organization. It’s true that free cooperation plays an important role, but people can’t just pick any IP address or host name they want, or else there would be conflicts. For example, we can’t start a server named bjc.org, because that name is already in use (by a health care provider in St. Louis, Missouri). Until 2009, the Internet domain name hierarchy was entirely controlled by the United States government, with the details delegated to ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers).
In 2009 the US Department of Commerce signed a new agreement with ICANN recognizing it as an independent, multinational organization, although it is still under contract with the Department of Commerce to maintain certain principles. International critics are still not satisfied that ICANN is truly independent of the United States.
The Power of Open Protocols
The growth of the Internet has been fueled by open protocols, standards that are not owned by a company.
Examples of open protocols:
- Standards for sharing information and communicating between browsers and servers on the Web include HTTP, Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) and secure sockets layer/transport layer security (SSL/TLS)
- Standards for packets and routing include transmission control protocol/Internet protocol (TCP/IP).
The protocols for the Internet change over time. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) are the experts in charge of developing and approving these protocols. ICANN controls the DNS hierarchy and the allocation of IP addresses.
Learn more about these organizations.
The work of the IETF is done largely by email, and anyone with the necessary expertise can join the mailing lists. Decisions are made by consensus (everyone has to agree to a change), never by voting. The idea is that if a proposal is controversial enough to need a vote, then it should be improved until everyone’s objections are satisfied. Unlike ICANN, the IETF has been remarkably free from political pressure, even though it, too, has historically been dominated by experts from the United States.
The Internet Society (ISOC) is a worldwide nonprofit membership society that anyone can join, for free. It is now officially in charge of the IETF and also conducts education and promotes government policies supporting an open Internet.
The Issue of US Control
If you think it’s strange for one country to control a worldwide network, you’re not alone. Other countries have never been happy about the US control of the Internet, which was officially under US control until 2009 and is still, according to many critics, unofficially dominated by the US government.
For example until 2009, all DNS domain names had to use the English alphabet, despite constant requests to accommodate other languages.
The issue of US control has become much more heated since 2013 when Edward Snowden (shown right, source: Wikipedia) exposed the US National Security Agency (NSA) for spying on Internet traffic worldwide. It’s too soon to know how these concerns will eventually be resolved.
How Did the US End Up In Charge?
In 1968, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the US Department of Defense announced that they were developing a large-scale packet-switched network. In 1969, the first connections were made among four university research groups. At its peak, the ARPANET reached a few hundred computers. (All those computers were owned either by military installations or by computer science research labs, mostly at universities.)
The ARPANET was tiny, but it inspired the protocols that became foundation of the Internet. And it belonged to the US military.
Once IP was invented in 1982, the ARPANET became just one network among many, and it was decommissioned in 1990. And in 1981, the National Science Foundation (NSF, a civilian agency of the US government that also funded the development of this curriculum) had built the core of a new cross-country network. At that time, businesses still weren’t allowed on the network, but there was a clear demand. So, commercial IP-based networks were created.
How did we move from research to commerce?
During all this time, the assignment of IP addresses and host names was controlled first by the ARPA and later by NSF. But when the commercial use of the Internet became larger than the research use, that control was passed to the US Department of Commerce, which set up ICANN to control the domain namespace and allocation of IP addresses.
In 2009, the Department of Commerce signed an agreement making ICANN independent, although it still has a contract with the US that gives the Department of Commerce a role in reviewing ICANN’s operation.