Who Controls your Internet? How Internet Works?

Have you ever thought about who runs the internet? Who controls the internet worldwide?
Since, internet is an important tool in maintaining freedom and democracy worldwide.
Therefore, it is essential to understand how the internet works and what it is.

Who controls the internet?

www.youtube.com, this is a URL/link. In which “youtube” is called a domain name, and
“.com” is called as top-level domain.
If you want to build your own website then you will have to buy your domain name. And
there are some websites that sell domain names as their job. For example: godaddy.com.
Now the question is who gave the authority godaddy to sell the domain name?

There is another Top-Level Authority above it regarding the internet. The name of this
authority is ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers). This decides
which website can sell domain names, also decides which domain name can actually exist.
There could be .com, .in, .info or .gov etc, all these are decided by the ICANN.

It sells top-level domain name to the rest of the companies by bidding. The companies that it
sells to are called " registries ''. You can go on the website of ICANN and can see which
companies have bought the different top-level domains.
For example: “.aaa” has been bought by American Automobile Association
Below the registries are the registrars. Companies like Godaddy.com that can sell both top-
level domain as well as domain name to the people.

So, is ICANN the God of internet?

This can’t be said because the internet is a very decentralized network. It is like net. All the
mobile phone and computers that are connected to the internet, make up the internet you
could call it a “server”. Your mobile phone and computers are data centres and servers
that are connected to each other through wires. Huge underwater cables have been laid
worldwide across the continents that connect the computers worldwide to one another,
which makeup the internet.
Mobile phones operate through mobile towers and offer 3G, 4G which do not have an
extremely wide range. Your mobile phone has the 3G/4G signal only when you are closed to
the mobile towers, but if you move a little further away then, the signal on your phone won't
show up. So, the tower of the mobile phones is actually connected to wires, and they are
actually connected to those wires that are connected to the wires connected worldwide.

So, in a way you could say that the company that has laid down these wires holds a huge
amount of significant power because it is supplying Internet to the mainly different places.
Secondly you could say that the companies that laid down cables on the land to help internet
reach every household by connecting these wires to the main cable and connect your
computer to the internet worldwide.
They too hold the huge amount of significant power. They are called Internet Service
Providers-ISPs. These would be companies like Airtel, Jio, BSNL that supply internet to you
homes.
What is IP Address?
Just like every mobile phone has a number from which you can call another mobile phone,
Similarly, every device that is connected to internet has an IP address. Either it is your
computer, your smartphone, or be it any other server like a Data Centre, if it is connected to
the internet, it will have an IP address (58.176.XX.XXX), each website too, has an IP
address(facebook.com(157.240.16.35))

Now you could say that the you type the domain name, not the IP address. The domain names
are connected to the IP address. Actually, humans cannot read the IP address because is
written in digits and number. So, the domain name is a human readable form of an IP address.
When you type the domain name of a website in your browser then the thing that converts the
domain name into the IP address is called Domain Name Server - DNS.

So, let’s revert to our original question...

Who controls the internet? Whom does it belong?
The correct answer to this would be there it belongs to nobody and belongs to everybody.
Because the Internet runs only when it is a decentralized system. And if you wish to buy a
part of internet You can only buy a part of the internet. You can do only when you build a
website of your own. How can you build the website? Buy your own domain name and then
you need to buy a server where you can store your website.

Your mobile phones and your computers could also be servers yes, but it does not have
enough processing power and space to store an entire website. Also, neither your computers
nor your phones run 24/7. Only when it runs 24/ 7, will your website be available to the users
24/7 on the internet.