Al Gore may not have really invented the Internet, but we can still bloody well control it, the U.S. seems to be saying.

In a gesture which is being seen by some as the U.S. thumbing its nose at the global Internet community, the U.S. has drawn a line in the sand and said, in essence, “possession of the Internet is 9/10s of the law”. Or something.

Of course, you can’t really possess the Internet, and indeed to the extent that one could, it is not regulated by any particular law. But let Aunty back up here.

For purposes of this discussion, what you need to know is that there is a certain file, if you will, called a “zone file”, which contains the DNS (Domain Name and Addressing System) information - the roadmap - for the Internet. Or you can think of it as a flow chart. The point is, when a computer system is looking for another computer system on the Internet, the data in this file tells it where to go, so to speak.

That file is mirrored at any given time at several sites around the world, so there are always many fresh copies of it, and the lookup load is distributed across these files.

However, there is one which is considered to be the master file…

[It's Our Internet, And You Can't Have It, Says U.S., Continued]