“Who owns the Internet?” It’s a very simple question until one tries to answer it.
And it prompts further questions, not least among them, “who owns the web?” and “can my business be protected?” For thousands of years, describing and defining property has helped us decide if it belongs to a company, person, government, or other tangible organization.
Physical extent and location have traditionally enabled societies to determine not only the rightful owner, but also the country under whose jurisdiction something falls.
This principle of state sovereignty, which is at least as old as the 1648 Peace of Westphalia between major
European powers, bestows on governments control and oversight of whatever takes place on their territories.
As enshrined in Article 2 of the United Nations Charter, it protects sovereign nations from “the threat or use
of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.”
In many countries, ownership of Internet infrastructure is in private hands such as domestic internet service providers; AT&T Internet, Verizon Internet, and Spectrum Internet. Examples of foreign internet service providers include; BT Broadband, EE, Eolo-NGI, and Fastweb.
Increasingly, technology companies such as Microsoft, Meta, Alphabet and entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk seek to shape society’s future through intellectual property and direction of its information through communications technology. As of summer 2022, Musk reportedly owns one third of all the active satellites in Earth’s orbit and plans to increase this proportion to two thirds by the autumn of 2023.
Starlink, operated by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, is a global network of low-orbit satellites that bypasses the terrestrial internet, and helped restore connectivity in Ukraine after the Russian invasion. His decision to supply Ukraine with satellite-based communications equipment has been widely credited with keeping the country’s Internet access up and running following Russia’s invasion. In this respect, Big Tech executives have become leading players on the world stage, statesmen in their own right, whether governments like it or not with a complexed strategy of ownership of the internet.
Although deterred, this hasn’t stopped governments around the world trying to control the parts of the Internet they deem to be on their territories and within their jurisdictions. In countries with state-owned or state-controlled ISPs, it is arguably easier to
restrict who can access the global Internet (as in the case of North Korea), and which platforms are accessible
to citizens (China, Iran, and Russia being the best known examples of these). But even in countries with
evidently freer societies, governments seek to police the information accessible to their citizens online as seen with America RT.
Evidently, there can be people, organizations and alike claiming ownership of the internet. However, no company or government can claim ownership of it. The internet is more of a concept than an actual tangible entity, but the infrastructure routers, cables, antennas, internet exchange points and data centers are tangible entities owned by individuals, companies, and organizations which rely on a physical infrastructure that connects networks to other networks.
Who Owns The Web?
While we tend to use the two interchangeably in modern parlance, the Internet and the Web are separate entities and controversially owned. Okay, you are thinking: “but didn’t you conclude that no company or government can claim ownership of it?” Correct.
However, the Web is a software and evidently comes under complexed copyright law. For example, the copyright of the content on a website page. The Internet is a series of networks, the Web is your portal to accessing those networks – the Internet’s connections consist of computers and cables, the Web’s connections are hypertext links, or, a name for all the information you can access online which can be viewed on a website. The Internet actually predates the world wide web by a decade and a half, and the Web could not exist without it, according to computing icon and Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee.
People, companies, and organizations own elements of the web. Because of this your business and website needs to be protected.
When you start a new business, it’s always important to strategically plan solutions and ensure you stick to your plan. However, if you lack any knowledge or expertise in this field, it makes a lot of sense to work with an expert. That’s why it’s imperative to hire the best small business consulting services you can afford. This way you can get the insider knowledge and guidelines that will help your small business or startup achieve the success you want.
Your website says more about your business than you think. If you hold no intellectual property, if the website is static, non-responsive, outdated, not optimized for mobile devices and search engines, you may be losing sales, opportunities, rankings, and organic leads.
Reach out to a specialist from our team at Wyoming Investor to capitalize on your business strategy