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However, that my friends is nothing but a myth. Yes I mean it, and in the course of this article, I’ll give you reasons to agree with me and logically conclude as to who actually controls the Internet.

For starters, here’s a brief on the evolution of the Internet.

We all know that the Internet has been invented, groomed and developed to the current state by the United States of America. It all started when …     

J.C.R. Licklider of MIT, first proposed a global network of computers in 1962, and moved over to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in late 1962 to head the work to develop it. Leonard Kleinrock of MIT and later UCLA developed the theory of packet switching, which went on to form the basis of Internet connections.
The Internet, then known as ARPANET, was brought online in 1969 under a contract let by the renamed Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) which initially connected four major computers at universities in the southwestern US (UCLA, Stanford Research Institute, UCSB, and the University of Utah).

The term “Internet” was coined jointly by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn in their paper on Transmission Control Protocol (TCP/IP is now the standard for Internet infrastructure the world over.)
However the Internet boom came with the advent of 1990’s when the graphical user interface (GUI) was developing fast. This was the time when PCs were fast becoming an essential part of a western house, at the same time internet charges were also coming down steeply and more importantly within the reach of the commons.
It was in 1998, owing to the increasing traffic, or in other words, the increasing popularity of the web, that the US govt. decided to privatize the Internet. In 1998 came the Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).
Operating under an agreement with the U.S. Commerce Department (partly) free of government interference, the corporation goes about its work largely shielded from the average internet user’s sight. To the average internet user ICANN is unknown or merely a controlling body for TLDs. However, the ICANN is also an administrating body and looks over the infrastructure that forms the lifeline of the Internet, the meaningless numbers and files, the domains and the IP addresses etc. So far so good, nothing out of line as long as you don’t go back to the fact that, a seemingly harmless body overlooks the rather drab work of plumbing the information pipelines.

This is where most of us miss it. The plumber here is not as harmless and un-interfering as he seems.  The Plumber can actually determine what you access and what not, can even stop all information supply to your office, home, city or even country. Remember it is this plumber who overlooks and controls a majority of the pipelines around.
So who’s the plumber? It’s the US Department of Commerce that the ICANN is answerable to.

So now we have a clear link, Internet -> ICANN -> US Department of Commerce