tech
Who Owns the Internet? Five Layers, Five Different Owners
In brief
Who owns the internet?
Nobody owns the internet as a whole, because it is not a thing that can be owned - it is an agreement between about 80,000 independently owned networks to carry each other's traffic. But every layer beneath that agreement is owned by someone specific, and those owners are identifiable, concentrated and increasingly the same handful of companies.
The names are coordinated by a Californian non-profit. The addresses are handed out by five regional membership bodies. The rules are written by an open standards body no one owns. And the physical cable - the part that actually carries 99% of intercontinental traffic - is now owned in large part by Google, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon rather than by telecoms carriers.
Why the question has five answers
"Who owns the internet" is usually answered with "nobody", which is true and useless. The internet is a stack of independently governed layers, and each layer has a different owner with different powers. Confusing them produces most of the myths - that ICANN can switch a country off, that the US government still controls the root, that Google owns the internet.
Read the layers separately and the picture becomes precise.
Figure
The five layers, and who owns each one
1 · Names
The DNS and the root zone
ICANN, a California non-profit public benefit corporation, coordinates the namespace through its subsidiary PTI. Verisign maintains the root zone file under contract and separately operates the .com registry.
2 · Numbers
IP addresses and AS numbers
IANA delegates blocks to five Regional Internet Registries - ARIN, RIPE NCC, APNIC, LACNIC and AFRINIC - which are member-owned non-profits. They allocate onward to ISPs, who assign to users.
3 · Rules
Protocols and standards
The IETF publishes the specifications - TCP/IP, BGP, HTTP, TLS - as open, royalty-free RFCs. Nobody owns them and nobody licences them. This is the only layer where "nobody owns it" is literally correct.
4 · Routes
Networks and interconnection
Roughly 80,000 autonomous systems, each privately owned, agree to exchange traffic through transit contracts and settlement-free peering at internet exchange points. There is no central operator.
5 · Cable
Physical infrastructure
More than 600 submarine cable systems carry over 99% of intercontinental data. Ownership has shifted from carrier consortia to the hyperscalers, which now own or co-own a large and growing share.
Control weakens as you go up the stack and strengthens as you go down it. Nobody owns layer three. A handful of companies increasingly own layer five.
Layer 1: who owns the names
ICANN is a non-profit public benefit corporation incorporated in California. It does not own domain names; it coordinates the system that makes them unique, and it contracts with the registries that run each top-level domain. The IANA functions - maintaining the authoritative registries of names, numbers and protocol parameters - are performed by Public Technical Identifiers, an ICANN affiliate.
Until 2016 the US government held a residual oversight role, through a contract between ICANN and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration. That contract lapsed on 1 October 2016 and was not renewed; oversight passed to a multistakeholder accountability structure written into ICANN's own bylaws. This is the single most misunderstood fact about internet governance: the US government's formal control of the DNS root ended a decade ago. internetsociety.org
Verisign occupies two positions in this layer that are worth separating. It is the Root Zone Maintainer, generating and publishing the root zone file under an agreement with ICANN that was renewed in 2026 for a further eight-year term. And it is the registry operator for .com under a separate registry agreement, most recently renewed in December 2024 - a commercial contract covering the most valuable namespace on the internet. icann.org
The thirteen root servers are twelve organisations
The root of the DNS is served by thirteen named servers, A through M. They are not thirteen machines and they are not owned by one body. They are operated independently by twelve organisations - Verisign runs two - spread across companies, universities, non-profits, research consortia and, notably, three arms of the US federal government.
| Letter | Operator | Type of organisation |
|---|---|---|
| A | Verisign, Inc. | US listed company |
| B | Information Sciences Institute, USC | US university institute |
| C | Cogent Communications | US listed company |
| D | University of Maryland | US public university |
| E | NASA Office of the Chief Information Officer | US government agency |
| F | Internet Systems Consortium | US non-profit |
| G | Defense Information Systems Agency | US Department of Defense |
| H | US Army DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory | US Department of Defense |
| I | Netnod | Swedish non-profit |
| J | Verisign, Inc. | US listed company |
| K | RIPE NCC | Dutch membership association |
| L | ICANN | California non-profit |
| M | WIDE Project | Japanese research consortium |
Each letter is served from many physical sites using anycast routing, so a query goes to the nearest instance. In August 2026 the root server system consisted of just over 2,000 operational instances worldwide, distributed very unevenly - the F-root operator alone ran several hundred sites, while some letters run fewer than ten. root-servers.org
Three of the twelve operators are US government bodies: NASA, the Defense Information Systems Agency and the Army Research Laboratory. This is a historical artefact of the internet's origins rather than a control mechanism - no root operator can alter the zone contents, which are published centrally - but it is a real and rarely noted concentration.
The US government's formal control of the DNS root ended on 1 October 2016. Almost everything written since assumes otherwise.
Layer 2: who owns the addresses
You do not own an IP address. You hold a registration of it. IANA delegates large blocks to five Regional Internet Registries, which are non-profit membership organisations governed by the networks in their region. They allocate onward to Local Internet Registries - typically ISPs - which assign addresses to end users.
| Registry | Region | Legal form |
|---|---|---|
| ARIN | United States, Canada, parts of the Caribbean | US non-profit membership corporation |
| RIPE NCC | Europe, Middle East, parts of Central Asia | Dutch membership association |
| APNIC | Asia-Pacific | Australian non-profit membership body |
| LACNIC | Latin America and the Caribbean | Uruguayan civil association |
| AFRINIC | Africa | Mauritian non-profit company |
The distinction between registration and ownership stopped being academic once IPv4 ran out. Address blocks now trade for real money on transfer markets operated under registry policy, and large legacy holders - universities, defence departments, early corporate adopters - sit on blocks worth hundreds of millions. The registries police those transfers precisely because they maintain that addresses are allocated, not sold. ripe.net
Layer 3: the part nobody owns
TCP/IP, BGP, DNS, HTTP, TLS - the protocols that define what the internet is - are published by the Internet Engineering Task Force as RFCs. They are open, free to implement, and encumbered by no licence fee. The IETF has no members in the corporate sense; participation is individual, and decisions are made by rough consensus rather than voting shares.
This is the layer where "nobody owns the internet" is literally true, and it is the reason the whole thing works. A network in Lagos and a network in Osaka can exchange traffic because they implement the same freely available specification, not because they signed a contract with a common owner. Every other layer's ownership sits on top of that unowned foundation.
Layer 4: the 80,000 owners
The internet's operational reality is roughly 80,000 autonomous systems - independently administered networks, each with its own AS number - announcing routes to one another via BGP. Each is owned by someone: a carrier, a university, a bank, a government, a content company. There is no central operator and no master routing table; the global routing table is an emergent product of everyone announcing what they can reach.
Sitting near the top of that hierarchy is a small set of transit networks that reach the entire routing table without paying anyone for transit - commonly listed as including Lumen, Arelion, NTT, Cogent, GTT, Tata Communications and a handful of others. Below them, networks buy transit or exchange traffic for free at internet exchange points such as DE-CIX, AMS-IX and LINX, which are themselves typically member-owned or non-profit.
The commercial trend of the last fifteen years has been networks buying less transit and peering more, which has quietly moved power away from the traditional tier-one carriers and towards whoever owns the content and the cable.
Layer 5: the cable, and the companies that now own it
The layer people imagine least is the one that has changed most. More than 600 submarine cable systems carry over 99% of data moving between continents. Satellites, including modern low-earth-orbit constellations, carry a rounding error by comparison.
Historically these cables were built by consortia of national telecoms carriers. That model has been displaced. Content and cloud networks now account for around three-quarters of used international bandwidth, and the four hyperscalers own, co-own or buy capacity on a growing share of the systems in service - roughly 90% of trans-Atlantic capacity, on industry estimates, and a majority of planned deployments.
Share of used international bandwidth, content and cloud networks versus everyone else
Industry estimate of used international bandwidth. "Content and cloud" means the hyperscalers, dominated by Google, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon; "everyone else" is carriers, ISPs, enterprises and all other users combined. This measures traffic carried, not cable kilometres owned - the two are related but not the same.
| Company | Position in subsea cable | Notable systems |
|---|---|---|
| Stakes in roughly 34 cable systems, several wholly owned | Curie, Dunant, Equiano, Firmina, Grace Hopper, Nuvem | |
| Meta | Stakes in roughly 20 systems | 2Africa, Anjana, Project Waterworth |
| Microsoft | Co-owner of several trans-Atlantic systems | Marea, Amitié |
| Amazon | Mix of consortium stakes, capacity purchases and dedicated builds | Fastnet (US-Ireland) |
The strategic point is not that these companies are large. It is that the layer with the least public oversight is the layer where ownership is concentrating fastest. Domain policy is made in open multistakeholder forums with published minutes. Address policy is made by member vote at regional registries. Cable ownership is decided in private commercial negotiations, and a cable landing station is a physical asset in a specific jurisdiction that can be inspected, taxed, seized or cut.
Names and numbers are governed in public. Cable is bought in private - and cable is where ownership is concentrating.
What this means when someone says they can "shut off the internet"
What is centralised
The root zone file: one authoritative file, published centrally, distributed to thirteen letters.
Top-level domain contracts: a country-code domain can in principle be redelegated.
Physical landing points: a handful of chokepoints carry disproportionate traffic.
What is not
Routing: no one can withdraw a network's routes except its own peers and transit providers.
Protocols: unowned and unlicensable, so they cannot be revoked.
The 80,000 networks: separately owned in separate jurisdictions with no common controller.
National shutdowns happen constantly, but they are executed by governments ordering domestic ISPs to stop routing - layer four, inside one jurisdiction. They are not executed at the root. The distinction matters, because it explains why shutdowns are always national and never global.
Frequently asked questions
Does the US government own the internet?
No. The US funded its predecessor, ARPANET, and held a contractual oversight role over the DNS root until 1 October 2016, when that contract expired and was not renewed. Three US federal bodies still operate root servers, but root server operators cannot change the contents of the root zone.
Does ICANN own the internet?
No. ICANN is a California non-profit that coordinates unique identifiers - domain names, IP address blocks and protocol parameters. It has no authority over routing, over content, or over the physical network.
Who owns the undersea cables?
Individual cable systems are owned by consortia or by single companies. The historical owners were national telecoms carriers; today Google, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon own or co-own a large share, with Google holding stakes in around 34 systems and Meta in around 20.
Can you buy an IP address?
You can buy the right to a registration, and IPv4 blocks trade for substantial sums, but the registries' position is that addresses are allocated rather than sold. Transfers must be recorded and approved under registry policy.
Who owns the .com domain?
Verisign operates the .com registry under a contract with ICANN, most recently renewed in December 2024. It operates the namespace; it does not own the individual domains, which are registered to their holders through accredited registrars.
How many networks make up the internet?
Around 80,000 autonomous systems are visible in the global routing table as of 2026. Each is separately owned and administered, and they interconnect voluntarily through transit contracts and peering agreements.
Key takeaways
The bottom line
- The internet as a whole is unowned. Each of its five layers has a distinct owner with distinct powers, and the myths come from mixing them up.
- Names are coordinated by ICANN, a California non-profit; Verisign maintains the root zone file and runs .com under contract.
- Thirteen root server letters are operated by twelve organisations, three of them US federal agencies, across more than 2,000 anycast instances.
- Addresses are allocated, not owned, by five member-run regional registries - though IPv4 scarcity has created a real transfer market.
- The protocols themselves are owned by nobody and licensed to nobody. That is what makes the rest interoperable.
- The physical layer is consolidating fastest: content and cloud networks account for roughly three-quarters of used international bandwidth, and hyperscalers now own or co-own a large share of the 600-plus submarine cable systems.
Final word
The internet was designed so that no one could own it, and that design has held at the layer of protocols and routing. What has quietly changed is the ground beneath it: the cable, the landing stations and the exchange capacity are being bought by four companies, and that is where the ownership question is now genuinely live.