Question 1

Who actually runs the internet?

Accepted Answer

**Nobody, and several bodies with narrow remits** — which is the accurate answer rather than an evasive one. There is no central authority; there are institutions that coordinate specific scarce resources, and everything else is voluntary interconnection between independent networks.

**The bodies that matter, and what each actually controls:**

**IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force)** writes the protocol standards — TCP, IP, HTTP, DNS — published as RFCs. It has **no enforcement power whatsoever**; standards succeed because people implement them. Participation is open to individuals, and decisions are made by **rough consensus** rather than voting.

**ICANN** coordinates the **naming system**: which top-level domains exist, who operates them, and the policies around them. Its remit is names and numbers, and nothing else.

**IANA**, operated under ICANN, maintains the actual registries — the root zone, IP address allocations, protocol parameter numbers.

**The five RIRs** (RIPE NCC, ARIN, APNIC, LACNIC, AFRINIC) allocate **IP addresses and ASNs** to networks in their regions.

**Root server operators** — twelve organisations running the root DNS service, which is distributed by anycast across hundreds of physical locations.

**W3C and WHATWG** handle web standards: HTML, CSS, the browser platform.

**Regional and national regulators** control what happens inside their jurisdictions — licensing, spectrum, lawful interception, content rules.

**Where the actual power sits.** Not with any of these, but with the **network operators**: the thousands of autonomous systems that decide who to peer with and what routes to accept. The internet exists because these independent decisions happen to interlock, and a network can be effectively disconnected if enough others stop accepting its routes.

**The genuine tensions:** the multistakeholder model versus governments preferring state-led control through the ITU; the concentration of traffic in a handful of large platforms and CDNs; and the influence of the small number of countries where key infrastructure sits.

Question 2

What is the difference between a domain registrar, a DNS provider and a web host?

Accepted Answer

Three separate services that are frequently bought from one company and are entirely independent — and understanding the separation is what makes moving any of them possible without breaking the

Question 3

What is an autonomous system number (ASN)?

Accepted Answer

A globally unique identifier for a network under a single routing policy — an ISP, a large hosting company, a university, a bank. It is the unit in which the internet's routing table is expressed,

Question 4

How is internet filtering and censorship actually implemented?

Accepted Answer

Through several techniques operating at different layers, each with different costs, different accuracy and different ease of circumvention — and most real systems combine them. The techniques, in

Question 5

What is an RFC, and how does an internet standard get made?

Accepted Answer

A Request for Comments is a numbered document published by the IETF describing a protocol, a procedure or an observation — and the name is a historical artefact that persists, because many RFCs are

Question 6

What is DNSSEC, and why isn't it everywhere?

Accepted Answer

DNSSEC adds cryptographic signatures to DNS records so a resolver can verify that an answer genuinely came from the domain's owner and was not altered in transit. It addresses a real weakness, and

Question 7

What is net neutrality, and what does it actually require?

Accepted Answer

The principle that networks should carry all traffic equally, without favouring or discriminating between sources, destinations or applications on commercial grounds. What it prohibits, specifically:

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