Who controlls the Internet?

Sun Jul 25 19:17:17 UTC 2010

On Jul 25, 2010, at 8:05 PM, Tarig Yassin wrote:
> probabaly every web server in USA e.g. Google, Verisign and sourceforge.

ALL companies that operate in the US are bound by law to abide by restrictions that are defined at http://www.ustreas.gov/offices/enforcement/ofac/ and elsewhere.  Failure to abide by those laws can result in criminal sanctions (that is, being thrown in jail for years).  

However, the US is not the only country that restricts who does business with whom.  I suspect you'll find pretty much every country in the world has a similar list in one form or another.  In many cases, and depending on context, companies can obtain licenses that permit the provision of content and services to countries and people that are under sanction, but those companies have to do the work and I suspect most find it isn't worth the effort.

In addition, Intellectual Property owners may decide that they want to deny access to content for arbitrary reasons.  Examples of this outside of the Internet are region encoded DVDs.  These restrictions are determined by business models. 

The issue isn't that the US has these restrictions, rather it is that there is a lot of useful content that is generated in and/or distributed from the US.  One could argue that this encourages creation of and distribution channels for useful content outside the US...

> What if a large orginization which has an infrstructure in many countires, in which regulations the will comply, in terms to ban other countries accessing to thier Internet resources.

As has been pointed out, the Internet is a set of interconnected public and private networks. Each of those networks has their own rules about who they'll grant access and what resources they'll make available.  

Regards,
-drc