Anyone who makes a plugin (ie flash, silverlight, etc) are trying to own at least a piece of it, but, overall, I don't think anyone really owns it.
Bill gates has a switch in his torture chamber/sex dungeon that allows him to turn the internets on or off
Nobody owns the internet. It's a royalty free space that was invented by this man: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee I remember reading something about Tim saying that he wanted it to free for everyone... but if he'd put a copyright and patent on it he would of been the richest man on the planet.
Ouch. FAIL. Tim Berners-Lee invented the HTML web browser and the HTTP transport. What we think of as the "World Wide Web". While I know you young-un's think that the Internets and the WWW are the same thing, I'm here to tell you that you're WRONG! Why, back in my day... (very long tale mentioning Gopher, FTP, BBSes, Archie, Usenet, Trumpet Winsocket, Finger, and a bunch of other archaic terms that no one remembers any longer) ...and that's why you whippersnappers have no idea what you're talking about! Here's a quick history: The Internet was a network originally designed by the US Government as a research project. It was called ARPANet. ARPANet was eventually hooked up to a number of important Universities and Businesses. When the government shut down the project, the connections between those Universities and Businesses remained. More and more people started connecting to the internet and eventually it grew into the monstrosity we see today. So who owns the internet? Everyone. No one. Legions. It's difficult to answer simply. Basically everyone has their own property plugged in. Internet Service Providers charge you to route traffic, you own your computer, companies own their own servers, telecoms own long-distance wiring, and somehow the whole thing becomes more than the sum of its parts. As long as all that equipment keeps talking to all the other equipment, the internet will continue on.
He created hypertext, which later evolved into the HTTP protocol, but he didn't invent the Internet. The Internet, originally called ARPAnet, was conceptualized by J. C. R. Licklider in 1962 as the fanciful "Intergalactic Computer Network" during his term at the US Department of Defense's Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA). It was later formalized by ARPA's Ivan Sutherland and Bob Taylor and the build contracted to BBN Technologies in 1968. So, originally, owned and operated by the US Government's DoD as a more robust and reliable research network. (The survivability from a nuclear war thing is a bit of a myth, even though it's relatively true; it's just that this wasn't its purpose in being built.) It was later opened to commercial interests in 1988, starting with MCI Mail, the first Internet-based E-Mail system, and expanded globally from there. Berners-Lee did end up creating the Internet as we know it through the creation of the web.
When I think on how the internet is now, it came from this man... Yes, I agree, before that it was the governments that originally owed it - but in it's modern sense on how data is transferred around the planet, it can be traced back to Berners-Lee, plus the idea of a royalty free space that anybody can use. So, in a way, this man saved us from some business/government from owning the internet. Imagine been charged for every click you do as you browse around... that would be bad and the web would never of been what it is today. Thank God Berners-Lee was not a greedy man!
You are attributing concepts to Berners-Lee that were happening long before he arrived on the scene. The internet was already a very free place for academic research. Tim was merely a participant in an existing culture, not a founder. To heap all of that praise upon one man is to denigrate the numerous contributions made by others. For example, the internet is glued together with TCP/IP. A protocol that was developed by Berkeley students, included in their already "free" OS BSD, and ported to nearly every system on the planet. Why should their contribution be so easily ignored? Utter poppycock. You have a romanticized vision of how these things happened that is rather far from the truth. Was there a counter-culture that prevented "the man" from locking in the internet? Sure. The counter-culture in computing was an interesting evolution of the 60's counter-culture. The members wanted to be revolutionary and keep everything open. Their goals just happened to align with those of the government, who was trying to research reliable communications. In the case of ARPANet, openness meant reliability. Ergo, there was an uncommon (and some would say "unholy" ) partnership between the two. But the partnership worked and the internet was born. By the time Berners-Lee got to writing the first WWW browser, he was facing stiff competition from a number of competitors trying to implement hypertext. (If the term, "Project Xanadu" means nothing to you, then I recommend studying a bit more history behind the interwebs.) Berners-Lee managed to produce the first system that actually caught on. Which, BTW, it did so mostly because it was usurped almost immediately. A fellow by the name of Marc Andreessen was already attempting to corrupt the standard almost as soon as it was released. He went on to write the first popular web browser, Mosaic. Mosaic's popularity gave it almost absolute control over the standard. A situation that would persist and be used by the direct descendent of Mosaic: Netscape. Now there is an interesting point here. Andreessen had a short window of opportunity to completely control the world wide web via Netscape. For the most part he just made a lot of money. So I guess you could congratulate him on not sewing it up and preventing "the man" from taking over. But the truth is that the seeds had already been sewn a long time before. It didn't take long for Microsoft to replicate Netscape's technology and make a legitimate attempt at locking the internet to Microsoft's corporate will. Thankfully the same counter-culture that gave us the internet got wise and developed Firefox, Opera, KHTML, Safari, Chrome, and other solid competitors. Which means that we have a freedom today that we almost lost in the early years of the 21st century. So quit putting Berners-Lee on such a high pedestal. His accomplishments are extraordinary, but he did nothing out of the ordinary for his position. The internet continues on as an open entity because that's how it was created. It will only work as an open entity and any attempts to lock it down will be (apologies to John Gilmore) "seen as damage and routed around".
Nope. Though a few failures in networking equipment have caused one or two splits in the past where we ended up with a small piece of the internet disconnected from the rest of the internet.
