Internet ownership.

OK, so I admit that it was science fiction that got me to thinking about Internet ownership, and not any notion of the balance of world power in the light of global terrorism. As a founder member of the Internet Society of England, I would love to state that it's the Internet Society (ISOC) which rules the roost, but that would make me a liar and a fool (and I'm certainly no liar). While ISOC and its various subsidiaries oversee the formation of both policy and protocol, it's more a coordinating committee for central standards management. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the Internet Engineering Steering Group are the technical overlords, responsible for writing specifications and protocols. But does this confer the power of 'ownership' upon either? Er, no. So what about the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), who claim to playa major role in ensuring the interoperability of the web through the development of common protocols, and have done so for a decade? There's no doubting that with 400 or so member organisations, it wields a certain amount of influence, but the fact that individual members still use market forces to impose proprietary 'standards' upon us, undermines the interoperability argument somewhat. Witness first Netscape Navigator and then Internet Explorer; the prosecution rests.

A colleague of mine thinks that Cisco are front runners in the ownership stakes because, statistically speaking, more than 90 per cent of the world's routers are made by them. I don't think they own the Internet. Nor if the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) thought it did itself thanks to the management of the domain name system (DNS). But its legitimacy is bestowed upon them only by virtue of a contract with the US government. Anyway, there's a power battle about to begin in that particular arena, because the United Nations has expressed an interest on behalf of more than 200 nation governments, who quite rightly feel that they are entitled to an equal share of the perceived power. I question their motives, however, since they tried and failed to impose a tax on email messages in 1999. It suggests that money and power rather than equality and democracy is the real motive. Not that it really matters, as the US government - or any government for that matter - has little true power outside of its own borders and precious little within it... except those countries whose people already have little freedom of speech; the 'great firewall' of China springs to mind.

What if we use a metric of who could bring down the Internet if they threw their toys out of the global pram, does this change things? You might argue that it must be the big carriers and Telco's who own the Tier 1 Internet backbones. Yet individually they have limited power, after all the old maxim of 'the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it' applies: meaning that if one pipe imposed filters upon content or pulled out altogether, information would simply do what the Internet does best and find another route to travel.

It's not even the media that owns the Internet. They're forever on the back foot: dare I mention blogs or wikis? Sure, the music and computer industries are coming together with digital rights management (DRM) and there have been a handful of high profile, and low blow, court cases involving 13 year-olds sharing copyrighted music online. But has any of this dampened the enthusiasm of the online file-sharing brigade? Ask any parent of teenagers if you need a reality check.

Nope, true power lies with what ecommerce calls 'customers' and what corporations call 'market share'. I call them 'people'; the Internet community; ordinary punters like us. Yes, it's you and I who own the Internet, and it's you and I who will determine its future. With the threat of ever increasing restrictions and monitoring, now is the time that we started to act like real owners. Get involved with the Open Source movement, whether as a developer or as a user and stand up for open standards. Or would you rather leave it to chance and let the Dalek man, Henry Van Statton, own the lot in 2012?