A recent article published by the Russian Foreign Affairs Council (RFAC) claimed that some of organizations that engage in Internet governance have a clear U.S. bias. ICANN (The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) responded, saying the claims are false. This all sounds like worldwide politics in action, but it raises a good question – who owns the Internet?
There is no easy answer to that question. One question that can be answered is who owns the physical infrastructure of the Internet. The answer is every ISP or government that owns wired or wireless infrastructure that connects to users. The network bringing you the broadband to read this blog is part of the Internet. The biggest ISPs in the world own the lion’s share of Internet infrastructure. The ten largest ISPs are Verizon, Comcast, AT&T, Charter Communications, Deutsche Telekom, T-Mobile, Vodafone, Orange, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT), and KDDI. Infrastructure also means the undersea cables which are owned by a diverse set of investors, governments, and large data users like Meta and Google.
The other key component of the Internet are the hub sites where traffic is transferred between ISPs. The owners of the hubs around the world include ISPs, real estate investors, and governments.
The other big investment in the Internet is for the servers that house the data being transmitted. All ISPs own a few servers, but just in the U.S. there are some giant server farms such as those owned by Amazon (1.5 million), Microsoft (4 million), Google (900,000), and Facebook (30,000).
However, all of this infrastructure is not the Internet, just the infrastructure behind the Internet. There are organizations that define and promote standards for the Internet. This includes the World Wide Web Consortium (WC3) which defines standards for websites. ICANN coordinates and maintains key databases needed for routing traffic. There are others, including the Internet Assigned Numbers Association (IANA), the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), Internet Architecture Board (IAB), Internet Research Task Force (IRTF), and the IEEE Standards Association. Each of these organizations plays a role in regulating the Internet through the development of standards or maintaining databases.
The hardest question to answer is who owns the data sent over the Internet – since that is the ultimate commodity that makes this all work. Data is owned by several groups. The largest is probably the data-producing platforms like Meta, Google, Microsoft, and governments like in China. End users with their own servers own their own data, although it’s always been believed that ISPs and others snag most data that is unencrypted.
The original question I posed is who owns the Internet. I think the best answer is that it’s mostly owned by a group of giant companies and a few governments. Some own most of the infrastructure, others own the hubs, and others control the data. To counter the allegations made by the Russian Foreign Affairs Council, it’s hard to say that anybody controls the Internet.
The internet is owned by the duct tape, bailing wire and handshakes that allow it to actually operate.
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Though not “ownership,” it seems that the International Telecommunications Union should play a major role in making it all work, just as they have done for telegraph and telephone communications.
The Internet did start in the 1960s by DARPA as a communications network designed to connect vital government, research and academic institutions as a survivable network in the event of nuclear strikes on major metro areas.
When it was commercialized in 1992-93, the primary use was information — not communications with BBSs and commercial services like CompuServe and AOL.
Then when telecom went Internet protocol later that decade, email and VOIP — communications — took off. Today in 2025, the controversy over whether the Internet is a telecommunications or information service continues without resolution. IMHO, it’s both. But it plays such a vital role it should be regulated as IP telecom to ensure access and reliability.
As I’ve put in comments to the FCC, it appears to me that the information service and telecommunications parts are easily separable. 47 USC § 153(24) says “The term “information service” means the offering of a capability for generating, acquiring, storing, transforming, processing, retrieving, utilizing, or making available information via telecommunications, and includes electronic publishing, but does not include any use of any such capability for the management, control, or operation of a telecommunications system or the management of a telecommunications service.” . Note the “via telecommunications.” The server endpoints (whether my server, Facebook, or whomever) are, to me, the “information services,” and I connect to them via a telecommunication service. The stream of bytes I deliver to my ISP are delivered to my chosen endpoint unmodified (as modification would corrupt the encrypted message). ISPs have argued that DNS makes them an information service. But DNS is separable from the basic communication service. Many people use Google DNS yet use another ISP to tranport packets. DNS may be thought of as a phone book, relating names to numbers. It is separate from the transmission of the data. We used to have fax on demand. The fax server was the information service. The telephone link remained a telecommunications service. Some have argued that calling an ISP a telecommunications provider ties modern technology to the 1930s. It is probably appropriate to revisit the telecommunications rules (designed for plain old telephone service) to modernize thos rules, then apply them to all telecommunications services.
Also, it’s time to end these silly circular debates over infrastructure vs. adoption. They are not truly separate issues. Without infrastructure, there is no connection and no adoption.