Who really owns the world.

You are your IP address :

In the beginning was ARPA, a group of entities doing research for the U.S. Military.   ARPA created TCP and saw that it was good.   With 4 billion possible computers, how could it ever run out?    So the creators of the internet gave each one of them 16 million addresses to use, even though they only needed a handful.

If you are sort of geeky, you may have noticed there are very few low numbered IP addresses in active use (low meaning the first number of the 4)     12.52.75.125

AT&T owns  12.*.*.*  – they’re probably the only one in the group that actually deserves their own “Class A” network, as they were called back then.

Here is the list of who actually controls the Internet.   It’s an odd list with some famliar names.   You can find this list here.

When the Internet went public, the “handing out” of IP addresses was delegated to several Internet Address registries – ARIN for the United States, RIPE for Europe, APNIC for Asia-Pacific, AfriNIC for Africa, LacNIT for Central America, etc… and they were handed out in smaller and smaller groups.   You now have to actually prove you need IP addresses, not just ask for them.