<h1>Who's in charge here?</h1><div class="article-extension"><div class="content"><a href="http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/finance/2009/0320/1224243120941.html">http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/finance/2009/0320/1224243120941.html</a><br>
<br></div></div><span class="headline-info">KARLIN LILLINGTON</span><p>There isn’t really anyone in charge of the internet and no one runs it in a conventional sense</p> <p>ASKING
“WHO runs the internet” reminds me of a postcard I once bought that
stated: “The world is run by a small, evil group to which,
unfortunately, nobody I know belongs.”</p> <p>People must often feel
the same way about the internet. Just read some of what journalists –
like myself – write about what goes on online, about the attempts to
rein in illegal activity, to stop hackers, to protect children, to
legislate for the net, and the internet can seem a lawless,
out-of-control, even frightening place.</p> <p>In some ways, the internet – or, rather, parts of it – may be just that but, then, so is the day-to-day real world.</p> <p>And,
as in the day-to-day world, the internet features all the everyday,
enriching activities – pursuing hobbies with satisfaction, connecting
with friends and relatives, meeting new people with similar interests,
finding an answer to a question, figuring out how to do something,
buying stuff you need, finding that perfect gift, or just wasting time
in a contented way – that don’t get much daily scrutiny or a news story
at 6pm.</p> <p>Still though, people – parents especially perhaps –
often feel far more anxious about such things in cyberspace (but,
curiously, often without any concern about how their own online
activities are under watch and how such records are archived).</p> <p>Why
should this be so? I think the answer is closely tied to the question
of who runs the internet – in other words, who leads, who makes
decisions, who determines what happens, who knows what is going on.</p> <p>Many
people want a top-down answer. They would like to see a kind of
organisational chart that shows, in a diagram, who sits in the top box
in charge of everything, then who is in the next tier of boxes as the
second-in-command, and so forth down to the lowest rungs where, we
hope, on a local level, there might be someone whose job description
includes “answering questions from worried parents”.</p> <p>The reality
of the internet, though, is that there isn’t really anyone in charge.
It’s amazing, isn’t it, when you think about it?</p> <p>The internet is
arguably the singlemost important piece of infrastructure in the
developed world – economically, socially and culturally, it permeates
the lives of most people, whether directly or indirectly – and no one
runs it in a conventional sense.</p> <p>This is largely due to the way
in which the internet evolved – as a small, then gradually expanding,
network of interlinked computers within the US defence department and
some academic sites around the US back in the 1970s and 1980s. Because
of this (and a similar pattern for the world wide web, which grew out
of the Cern research facility in Switzerland, now better known for the
Large Hadron Collider that was switched on last year amid concerns it
would create a black hole), what became essential to running the
internet was not a department or organisation or even country (although
the US had, and to some degree still has, enormous say).</p> <p>Instead,
the technical specifications that enable computer to connect to
computer, device to device, device and computer to telecommunications
networks and so forth are critical.</p> <p>So the internet’s only real
global “leaders” are a set of three technical governing bodies: the
Internet Society; the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and
Numbers (Icann); and the W3 (world wide web) Consortium. These three
bodies set – or often, mainly encourage – specifications that nobody
can be forced to follow.</p> <p>But people, whether they are in charge
of the huge telecommunications networks around the globe or of a
university or corporate computer network, do tend to set up their
equipment according to standards agreed upon by such bodies. They can
also contribute to these standards at events such as International
Engineering Task Force meetings.</p> <p>One such meeting was held here
last summer and was one of the most democratic forms of near-chaos I’ve
witnessed (see <a href="http://tinyurl.com/c7ajvr">http://tinyurl.com/c7ajvr</a>).</p> <p>The reason why people
running networks will mostly follow the specifications is not because
they come to polite agreement, but because each knows that if they do
not eventually embrace the standards, their systems won’t be able to
talk to the internet very efficiently, or perhaps at all.</p> <p>So it is a functional and generally benign carrot-and-stick approach.</p> <p>The
stick is us, the general public. The folks running the networks feel
enormous pressure from users to get it right, as these users consider
the internet to be an indispensable part of their lives.</p> <p>How
indispensable? Well, a study late last year from the Pew Research
Centre in the US found that 46 per cent of women and 30 per cent of men
would rather give up sex for two weeks than be deprived of internet
access for the same period. And yes, those figures suggest that, while
women may not care too much about the internet’s hidden specifications,
they do have a few gripes about those of the opposite sex.</p> <p>Maybe
you don’t feel that anxious about getting online each day. But it is
nice to know that, collectively, we exert enough force to get all those
networks and organisations across the globe to comply with the
specifications that keep this amazing network of networks running for
us all.</p> <p><a href="mailto:klillington@irishtimes.com">klillington@irishtimes.com</a></p> <p>Blog and podcasts: <a href="http://www.techno-culture.com">www.techno-culture.com</a></p> <p><span class="print-edition">This article appears in the print edition of the Irish Times</span></p>