Taking "Control" of the Internet

http://technology.guardian.co.uk/wee...585288,00.html

Found this article on Slashdot, and I'm really kind of stunned.
Maybe I'm understanding this wrong, I'm tired and the day has a long way to go, but what I understand is that the hardware for sustaining and indexing the internet is American-controlled and on American soil; that the United Nations and European Union are both trying to find a way to forcibly remove this control from the US and thus place it in the hands of a coalition of other governments. They claim the reasoning behind this is that nations (for example, Brazil) have come to rely substantially on the internet in political ways, and that American control is... I don't know, dangerous or unnecessary or maniacal or something.

I, an American who's known and used the internet for a majority of my life, see this as needless interference by foreign governments. They're abusing the UN and EU to strip the US of it's internet controls.
So what if Brazil uses the internet for 90% of it's tax collection? It was their choice to begin to rely American technology and hardware/software in the first place, and now suddenly that constitutes a right for them to have control over it? I use the internet every day of my life, but you don't see me demanding control over any of it.
I don't want other countries like China to have a say in how to organize, manage and control the internet - that's just asking for rampant censorship of freedom of speech. That's one of the critical features about the internet - Anyone can publish anything, from political statements to message boards about Zelda to online journals to games to whatever they can think of, and they don't have to worry about any government censorship.
Interesting to note that local, state, and government laws all apply with the internet: can't download movies if it breaks international copyright laws, can't look at porn if there are laws against it, gotta pay all the same taxes if you live in certain nations buying things from certain other nations, and to break any of these is to risk getting caught and punished accordingly. Why, then, do these foreign governments want to regulate the internet itself? Not enough power for them as it is? America's doing the right thing by letting the net grow how the users want; why does anyone else have to interfere?

If other countries want to form a coalition and gain internet control, let them establish their own internet infrastructures with their own rules. The internet's based in America; if you don't like the way it's being run, don't use it.

But those are my thoughts - anyone else got another perspective?

Thank you.

No one 'controls' the internet, I didn't get very far in that article, I'm afraid, but the very idea that the Internet can be owned is false. The internet is really a large computer, it's a collection of hard drives with files on them. An internet browser lets you open those files, every website is on one or a couple of hard drives, each hard drive is on a server (or a set of them). These servers are in almost every country on Earth, who owns them depends on who pays for them, but unless the US government has bought every server they don't 'own' the internet. Even servers in the US aren't owned by the US government, unless they are ones bought by the government for government business.

From the article, defining "control":

In the early days, an enlightened Department of Commerce (DoC) pushed and funded expansion of the internet. And when it became global, it created a private company, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) to run it.

But the DoC retained overall control, and in June stated what many had always feared: that it would retain indefinite control of the internet's foundation - its "root servers", which act as the basic directory for the whole internet.

Hope that helps to clarify things.

Thank you.

So... The big shock is that the company that catalogues the internet is American? That seems like a rather small point, as even if they wanted to they couldn't cut off all internet access or anything like that, unlike AOL which filters the internet through it's servers and can actually block websites on the ISP level, it's like Big Brother, only owned by Warner Bros.

Human race controls the Internet. Like GDwarf said, Internet cannot be controlled. That article is just a miniature "propaganda" which tries to brainwash people into thinking that one nation is more powerful than the other because Internet is "being controlled" by so and so countries.

Where did the term "globalization" come from? From the interactions of economy, culture, and belief systems around the world. All of these shrink into one giant ball and you get this "Internet". Basically, everyone owns a little piece of the 'net. Whether you create your own website, you sign up for FTP accesses, you have your email account, you share files with other friends and families, you are part of the "Internet".

To say that a nation can join forces with another to control the 'net is ridiculous. To say that a nation can hold the monopoly and owns the 'net is ridiculous. Granted, USA did invent the so-called "Internet", but at the time it was for war purposes, to send information and intelligence from one place to another quickly. And even with that, it's not and cannot be fully considered as "true Internet" compared to today's development and expansion. It's more of a Peer-to-Peer file sharing than "surfing the 'net and sending military information to allies". You can almost say it's a type of "advanced telegraph".

That article is just wrong.