 When we were discussing the standardization activity which is carried out at the internet, the most common name that we kept on repeating was the Internet Society and another organization, the Internet Engineering Task Force. That particular activity of standardization was primarily meant for how the protocols are evolved over time, depending upon the changing user requirements and the evolution of technology. In this module, we should look at the bird's eye view of how the overall management and administration of the internet is done. It is known as the governance. So we are going to look at who actually owns the responsibility to take care of the affairs of the internet as a whole, who is doing it in reality and who is supposed to do it. Then we'd see what is shared on the internet in the form of contents is very important from the viewpoint of different cultures, different backgrounds and countries. So what all rules and regulations are applied and who is responsible for their application. And then finally, we'd look at some best practices and the golden principles in the form of net neutrality, which are being promoted and propped by certain honest, sincere scientists and citizens. So the question is, who owns internet? In terms of the hardware, it is understandable that the part of internet which is available in Pakistan belongs to the Pakistani internet service providers. But what about the ownership responsibility? In theoretical terms, no single person, no single organization or a government is responsible to take care of all the affairs of the internet. However, since the Americans are credited for the promotion and technological advancement of the internet, so naturally they are the de facto leaders in it. The non-profit, non-governmental organizations in the U.S. are mainly responsible for the upkeep management and smooth execution of the operations related to internet. And some of the organizations you already know, for instance, the internet cooperation for assigned names and numbers that is responsible for assigning the top level domains and certain other internet related assignments. The internet society, the ITF, the internet architecture board, these are responsible for the overall physical and protocol related architecture. Then we have the World Wide Web Consortium, also known as the W3C. This organization is related to the world wide web aspects. For instance, so far we saw the web pages to emerge and these are accessed on web servers but as technology evolves, certain devices, as in the machine-to-machine communication and the IoT, are also being put up on the internet. Now in order to access these devices, certain new standards and certain new protocols have to be realized. So W3 Consortium is responsible for it and we already know what is the scope and the ambit of the International Telecommunication Union is. As far as the rules, regulations, policies for the contents is concerned, it primarily covers two aspects. Number one, what all can be published on the internet and how can it be accessed? Of course, from culture to culture and for different nations and countries, the opinions and the approaches may vary. For instance, China has its own search engine, Iran has its own mail server. It means that while still being part of the international fraternity, these countries have somehow been able to define and work around their own definition of the content and they are trying to manage it at the national level. The fundamental principle that has so far been upheld is that everything is allowed on the internet till it starts to become unlawful or unacceptable in the eyes and ears of the people being part of the community. So we say that everyone is trustworthy unless it's proven otherwise. I've taken the resource from the website internetgovernance.org. It is called net neutrality. Net neutrality is basically a principle that is promoted globally for the promotion of the fair usage and service provisioning on the internet. There's a paper which is available on this website. I've taken excerpts from there. The net neutrality sometimes also comes with an alternate name called open internet order by the Federal Commission on Communications FCC in US. It has certain principles. For instance, the first one is that no one, no internet service provider or regulator should be allowed to choke or open the bandwidth for certain users because the essential concept at the heart of the TCP IP is that IP is best service. So why to regulate it and create quality of service based streams out of it? Well, personally, I may or may not agree to it. But in reality, this is a concern for most of the people who are trying to promote fair, transparent and easily accessible internet for everybody. The second principle is that everyone, every citizen, we call it netizen over the internet, should be allowed to have access to any kind of content. And regardless of the location from where the content is being accessed, this is being promoted as the next principle of net neutrality. So what it promotes is it discourages the telecommunication operators, the governments and certain other policy enforcement bodies to inhibit the flow of traffic to certain websites and also to discourage the denial of certain content from certain locations. This is a primary concern for those people who are trying to basically provide free resources to every nook and corner in the world. These two golden principles may look very honest and straightforward on the face of it. But we also have to understand that from the business viewpoint or from certain cultural or religious or any other viewpoint, this may have certain constraints. So while implementing net neutrality as a golden principle, these constraints have to be considered.