Week 18 - SEO, Packet sniffing and Astroturfing

Who controls the internet?

The management of the internet is an unknown by many people, the most common answer being governments. As governments are prioritising security, especially against the possibility of cyber warfare, they’re taking any form of measure to protect national databases, the USA in particular. So do governments have the freedom to change or alter the their own national websites? No each country does not have the final say as to whether a domain or suffixes can be created or changed for example, So who does have the final say?.

Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is an American authority which oversees, allocates and manages the domain name system and suffixes such as ‘.com’ and ‘.org’. So if a country wanted to change its domain name, which is at top level, it would have to be checked by the US department of commerce whom the (ICANN) is monitored by. This practically means the US government can allow or block alterations or modifications to domains which gives them the power as to who is and isn’t on the internet. This power unofficially means the US are in control of the internet. However, this raises the question of who controls what we can see on the internet? To be more specific, who controls what we see in ‘Google searches’?.

The emergence of Google bombing, what we see on the internet can be heavily influenced for political or humorous reasons for example. Google bombing refers to the influence the ranking of particular pages in results returned by the Google search engine. So a website for example will contain a link of another website thus increasing its rank creating the website to have a higher ‘page rank’. This is a common use of media manipulation and is a possible loophole created by firms in order to gain more advertising. Will governments intervene and stop this vicious cycle or will they eventually use this to their advantage?.