Who Owns The Internet?

This is a hard question to ask, because it shows the questioner doesn't really understand what's going on. The simple answer (nobody), or the obvious answers that people might expect (the government, corporations), are all wrong in very important respects. Saying that nobody owns it will only confuse the questioner, because obviously the Internet is made up of machines and wires, and somebody has to be paying for the electricity that those things use. Saying that the government owns it is wrong too, because it leads the questioner to think that therefore the government somehow should control it or regulate it in some fashion, which I will show is next-to-impossible. So here is my attempt to answer this ancient question, by means of an analogy. I'm sure that impatient readers are going to stop reading right away, because they won't want to hear a long analogy before I get to the real answer. Worse, it's going to be the `superhighway' analogy, which will probably turn off the readers who've probably heard the words `Information Superhighway' used, re-used, misused, and abused more times than anyone can count. For the rest of you who are still with me, think about the answer to this question: "Who owns this road?" The answer is always different, depending on what particular piece of blacktop you're talking about. For the purposes of this discussion, the `road' includes everywhere you could normally drive your car on some sort of paved surface, including not just regular roads but parking lots, private drives, logging roads and anywhere else somebody takes a semitrailer with stuff on it.

Your driveway was probably built when your house was built, and it's part and parcel of the whole package including land, house, and driveway, that you have a mortgage on. If it gets holes in it, you have to fix them yourself. Usually this means you are the one who looks in the Yellow Pages for the paving service, and you are the one who writes the check when the truck full of smelly stuff and smellier people has driven away again. If you are adventurous, it means you personally go out to Home Depot or Chase-Pitkin and buy a drum full of smelly stuff, and spend several hours misusing this mysterious substance before you start looking for the Yellow Pages like everyone else.
The driveway and parking lot in front of the Chase-Pitkin were paid for and built by the Chase-Pitkin people, so that anyone can get to the Chase-Pitkin store. If they didn't have this, then people would clog up the local streets parking their cars, and then they would get all muddy as they walked across the land to the actual store. Then they would find it difficult to carry their purchases back to the car, as shopping carts laden with building supplies do not do well on grass.
Most local streets and roads are built by the city or local government when they decide it's time to build them, and they're paid for by your local taxes. Here in Buffalo, New York, that's partly done by a county sales tax and partly that's done by taxes we pay to the state.
The Eisenhower Interstate Highway System is maintained by the state governments, but that gets paid for by the federal government through the Department of Transportation. Most of this system of roads is toll-free, but some parts of it (like the New York State Thruway, the section of I-90 that runs from the Pennsylvania border near Erie through Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, Albany, and south through New York City) are paid for by tolls that the State of New York collects.

In our advanced age, all of this is essentially transparent to the user, but it wasn't always like that. Think of how it must have been back in the early days of civilization; the path to my hut was wide enough for me to walk on, but if you came along it with your horse you would have trouble, because the path wasn't suited to horses. Or you and I might go get in an oxcart and try to see the King of Siam, and the oxcart would work admirably while we stayed within one kingdom, until we got to another kingdom where people used to use a different width for their cart axles. Then all of a sudden our oxcart wouldn't fit the ruts on the road any more, and we'd have to walk, or hire someone else's oxcart. Thanks to nationwide standardization of the widths and weights and heights of vehicles, we don't have those kinds of problems any more. The standard overpass height nationwide is 11 (? or is it 13?) feet, so anyone who's going to build a tractor-trailer knows they must build it no higher than that or the top will get torn off the first time the driver tries to go under a bridge. Conversely, anyone who wants to hang a traffic light over an intersection knows they have to have it at least 11 feet high or it'll get wiped out against the front of the first tractor-trailer that comes along. So now we have the ground transportation problem essentially licked. If you want to go somewhere, or you have some stuff you want to send somewhere, and as long as it isn't wider than the standard 9-foot interstate lane width and it isn't taller than the standard 11-foot overpass height, you can pack it into a tractor-trailer and have it driven wherever you want. You don't have to unpack and repack it when you cross from one state to another, it will fit through all the bridges and tunnels, and you can be essentially assured it will reach its destination. Now we have enough tools to talk about the way the Internet works, so now I'm going to start to talk about computer communications. First, let's look at the physical level of the network. At this level, we're talking about things like wires and fiberoptic transceivers; the actual machinery that sends the data around. The twin pillars that the Internet is built on are TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) and DNS (the Domain Name System). TCP/IP is a standard format for how data messages are to be addressed and annotated. If I want to send a huge pile of corn from Wichita to Chicago, I have to do a bunch of different things: break the pile of corn down into loads that are small enough to fit in one tractor-trailer each, I have to explain to the drivers exactly where it's going in Chicago (and where they have to come in Wichita to pick up the corn) and presumably I have to make sure that everybody's tractor-trailer has all the right lights, a horn, and all the myriad reflectors that trucks have to have. Every machine on the internet is connected somehow to some sort of physical network. It might be a regular Ethernet network, it might be some other kind of fiberoptic machinery, it might be regular old twisted-pair telephone wire. On the physical network, each different machine has a different physical address. For instance, every Ethernet card ever made has a random number written down in a chip somewhere inside the card; when you hook up a bunch of computers with Ethernet, the network cards each communicate and they all speak their physical addresses once in a while, and each card remembers the addresses of all the other cards on that segment, so if it's told, "send data to this physical address", it knows what to tag it with. But the problem is, all these different mediums have different standards for what an address is. On Ethernet every card has a different 64-bit number, on fiberoptic maybe each computer on the segment has a 16-bit number, and so forth. The purpose of TCP/IP is to give each physical computer a standard kind of address. A TCP/IP address is 32 bits, written xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx etc., assigned by NIC, class A, B, C networks etc data is broken into packets

Daniel F. Boyd / boyd@csgeeks.org

Last modified: Mon Jul 31 23:40:04 1995