Q: Critics say the US government basically controls the Internet.
A: That’s bulls—t. I’m sorry, I’m not supposed to say that to reporters, but that’s just a very bad misunderstanding. Ninety-nine percent of the Internet is in private hands. If you’ve got a computer at home, and a cable box or DSL line, you own a piece of the Internet. Most of the Internet is owned by the private sector, by businesses, by ISPs, by individuals, by governments— well, that’s not (the) private sector, but it’s not ICANN either and it’s not the United States.Q: So what about talk of a battle between the EU and the US over control of ICANN?
A: Governments frequently don’t believe anything can work if nobody’s in charge. As you look around the landscape, you discover that the only entity that has specific high-level responsibility, or unique responsibility for the Internet, is ICANN. And so the immediate and incorrect conclusion is that if ICANN has this unique responsibility, it must be in charge of the Internet. That’s, frankly, not true.
Those answers are from a recent interview of Vinton Cerf, one of the chief architects behind the underlying framework of the Internet.