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Controlling The Internet

The Internet is an American invention that goes back to the time of the cold war. The Pentagon tried at that time to develop a communication system that would be able to withstand a nuclear attack and that would make it possible for the leading politicians and military officers that had survived to get in touch with each other again and to launch a counter-attack. While still a student in Los Angeles, Vinton Deer invented it, along with a team of researchers supported by public funds. It was to be a revolutionary new means of communication. But in the early days it was reserved for a small minority of university people, for military officers and other initiated individuals.
Later, in 1989, the physicists Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau, researchers at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) of Geneva, drew up a hypertext system and invented the World Wide Web, something that would facilitate broadcasting and make Internet access possible for the general public, and would be instrumental to its tremendous and amazing expansion.
At the present time, and since 1998, the worldwide web is managed by the Internet Corporate Body for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a non-profit private copyright corporation based in Los Angeles, subject to Californian law and under the control of the Department of Commerce of the United States (DOC). ICANN is the big traffic controller of the network. It controls a system of thirteen powerful computers, called “root servers”, installed in the United States (four in California and six near Washington), in Europe (Stockholm and London) and Japan (Tokyo).
The principal function of ICANN is the coordination of the domain names (Domain Name System, DNS), that helps the users to navigate on the Internet. Every computer linked to Internet possesses a unique address called “IP address” (Internet Protocol). In the beginning these IP’s were a series of figures, difficult to memorize, but the DNS allows using letters and...