What really is the Internet? The Internet is not a single element, but millions of computers that communicate independently of a central controller and dynamically change their size based on the number of computers that connect or disconnect. The origins of the Internet can be traced back to US defense research conducted in the late 1950s at DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), when scientists wanted to link radar stations together as a defense against the threat of a weapons attack Russian nuclear weapons (Waldrop 78-79). As the prevalence of computers has grown, so has the Internet, transforming it from a service used for government defense into a consumer resource outside the government's jurisdiction. The ubiquity of the Internet and, today, of the Internet of Things, or the idea of ​​connecting everyday objects to the Internet to create a smarter world, calls into question who has the authority to regulate the content and information that can be disclosed. published there. As the Internet spreads to more and more users around the world, a growing number of nations are choosing to shut it down or heavily censor it over the objection of many U.S. leaders. Recent revelations by Edward Snowden have brought to light the ubiquitous surveillance of US citizens through the use of the Internet. The United States is contradicting its intrinsic values ​​contained in the Bill of Rights by unanimously spying on its citizens through the Internet. This raises the controversial question of “Who owns the Internet?”, because all the hardware that makes up the Internet is privately owned. Since the Internet, as the most authentic form of democracy available, is a resource that every person deserves the right to use, it should not be found...... middle of paper... we would never have imagined it before and it grows every day in new ways that we are still trying to grasp. Works Cited Markoff, John. “Growing Internet Censorship Hinders News, Study Says.” NYTimes.com. New York Times, October 11, 2011. Web. December 1, 2013. Roberts, Hal, David Larochelle, Rob Faris, and John Palfrey. et al. “Local Internet Control Mapping.” Computer Communications Workshop (Hyannis, CA, 2011), IEEE. 2011.Waldrop, Mitch. “DARPA and the Internet Revolution.” Darpa.mil. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, 2008. Web. November 17, 2013. Tessitore, Nicholas. "Our government weaponized the Internet. Here's how they did it." Wired.com. Condé Nast Digital, November 13, 2013. Web. December 1, 2013. Zittrain, Jonathan and Benjamin Edelman. Internet filtering in China. Publication. Np: IEEE, 2003. Internet Filtering in China. Harvard.edu, March-April. 2003. Web. 1 December. 2013.