I watched the news this morning..unfortunately.

[BuddyB]

It would appear that the "Internet" is about to be given away to some international consortium of countries. What in the world are these guys in D.C. thinking?? This entire setup is the creation of our military and scientist. A lot of money has been spent by the government, not to mention our tax dollars, in the creation of the Net. To me this is tantamount to the founders/owners of MuviPix, after all the hard work and investment, just hands the controls over to some foreign agency..sheesh. Am I missing something here? This appears to be something totally irrational, and downright dumb! Maybe someone here can straighten me out on this; does not compute.

[John 'twosheds' McDonald]

Sorry to sound a bit jingoistic but.....

British scientist Sir Tim Berners-Lee introduced WWW to the public on August 6, 1991.

The World Wide Web (WWW) is what most people today consider the "Internet" or a series of sites and pages that are connected with links. The Internet as a whole had hundreds of people who helped developed the standards and technologies that make it what it is today, but without the WWW the Internet would not be as popular and useful as it is today.

[BuddyB]

Thanks John, you mean Al Gore didn't invent the Internet? Good input that I was never aware of. Besides that John, there's nothing wrong with a bit of jingoism..I'm guilty.

[_Paz_]

Hmmm, I thought it was a combination of US Military and US and British scientists, and a lot earlier than 1991.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET

[John 'twosheds' McDonald]

ARPANET and the like were the "early forerunners". There were other collaborative networks also in existence, for example JANET (Joint Academic NETwork) for higher education establishments in the UK. I am sure that there were many, many other networks in existence around the globe most likely based in some way on the ARPANET design.

What Berners Lee's did was to "add on" Hypertext linkages which gave us the internet as we noWWW know it.

[Bob]

The world wide web originally used just text based hyperlinking. Later browsers added the ability to display images, but not inline. What really changed the game and made the world wide web popular and accessible to the average person was the Mosaic browser developed at the University of Illinois. What made that browser unique was it incorporated other Internet protocols into it and it was able to display images in-line. Essentially, it was the first modern browser. The world wide web really took off after that.

Despite the lay person's perception that the World Wide Web is the Internet, that is definitely not the case. There are many applications and protocols in use that have little or nothing to do with the web. Behind it all are a number of international organizations that perform various functions relating to Internet operations, standards, development, and growth. While some of the early Internet work was largely national, today the Internet is truly an international development. One of the fundamental Internet operations is the assignment of Internet addresses and domain names and the management of the primary domain name database. That function is currently the responsibility of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) which is located in the US and under contract by the Department of Commerce. The actual assignment of names and numbers is distributed internationally and managed by ICANN. ICANN is in turn overseen by the Department of Commerce. What the article is talking about is the termination of the contract with the Department of Commerce. Rather than the Department of Commerce, oversight would be by a new international organization which would be formed for that purpose. Nothing would change in the way ICANN operates or the distributed international naming and number assignment organizations. The US is simply stepping away from the oversight role of that function.

[BuddyB]

All of this is veerrrrryyy interesting. I may get educated yet..however, I'm not holding my breath.