WHO SHOULD RUN THE INTERNET?

摘要

Beginning when the U.S. government formally opened the Internet to commercial use, the issue of control has been a controversial matter for 20 years. A further, critical, issue is that the U.S. government signed an agreement in 1998 with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). Simply put, this U.S. based nonprofit corporation is responsible for administering the domain name system and IP addresses.rnThe Internet is possibly the most decentralized utility ever built, extending across international borders as far back to its beginnings as a research network in the 1970s. It then doubled in size (measured in numbers of users) each year through the 1990s; since 2000, worldwide growth has been dramatic but reflects a somewhat slower growth rate, and today, there are an estimated 1.4 billion users.