Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The 7 People Who Control the Internet

Episode Date: March 26, 2021

The internet is often considered to be an open environment where no one really controls anything. A company or a person might have control over a particular website but in the big scheme of things you can set up whatever websites you want without anyone’s permission.  This is mostly true, but not totally true. If you keep going up the chain of control on the internet, you will eventually reach the top, where there sit people who hold seven keys. Those keyholders are ultimately the ones who control the internet.  Learn more about the internet’s key masters on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.   Sign up for the Travel Photography Academy: http://TravelPhotographyAcademy.com -------------------------------- Associate Producer Thor Thomsen   Become a supporter on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/everythingeverywhere   Discord Server: https://discord.gg/UkRUJFh   Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everythingeverywhere/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/everywheretrip Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/EEDailyPodcast/ Website: https://everything-everywhere.com/everything-everywhere-daily-podcast/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The internet is often considered to be an open environment where no one really controls anything. A company or a person might have control over a particular website, but in the big scheme of things, you can set up whatever websites you want without anyone's permission. This is mostly true, but not totally true. If you keep going up the chain of control on the internet, you'll eventually reach the top, where there sits people who hold seven keys. Those key holders are ultimately the ones who control the internet. Learn more about the internet's keymasters on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. This episode is sponsored by the Travel Photography Academy. In 2007, I sold my home to travel around the world. I bought an expensive camera that I didn't know how to use and took a bunch of terrible photos.

Several years, 100 countries, and tens of thousands of photos later, I'd improved my photography to the point where I was winning national awards being named Travel Photographer of the Year three times in North America. I created the Travel Photography Academy, so you don't have to spend the many years that I did to improve your photography. Even though we can't easily travel right now, you can still work on improving your photography at home and in your own community. Just go to travel photography academy.com or click on the link in the show notes to start improving your photography today. The idea of seven keymasters holding the keys which control the internet may sound a bit like something out of the Lord of the Rings or maybe a Game of Thrones.

And I get it. But as you'll soon see, it's quite literally true. There are even ceremonies involved. doesn't involve the sacrificing of goats or chickens. Before we get to the Keymasters, we need a bit of backgrounder on how the internet works. Let's say you're at the computer and you want to go to a website. You open your browser and you type in some random website like Everything-Ewhere.com. How does your browser know which computer in the world to go to, to get the information that you're looking for?

The names we type into browsers are not what is actually used to identify computers. In reality, every computer on the internet has what's called. an IP address or Internet Protocol address. This is a 32-bit number that is written out in human-readable form as a series of four numbers from 0 to 255 separated by periods. An example for an IP address would be 35.255.43.3. This happens to be one of the IP addresses used for my website. Remembering a long string of numbers for everything would be really confusing, so instead we use domain names to direct us to the IP addresses, which is what's really happening behind the scenes. To use an analogy, every telephone has a telephone number. However, if you call your friend from a

smartphone, you might just click on their name in your address book. Many of us have completely forgotten people's phone numbers because we just use their names. The same thing is on the internet, except we have many billions of IP addresses. When you type a domain into your browser, It needs to figure out what the IP address is that's associated with that domain name. So the first step in visiting a website is figuring out what the IP address is, and that information is held on a domain name server or a DNS. So when you visit a website, you first visit a domain name server, which gives you the IP address, and from there you can visit the website.

It all happens so fast you don't even realize it's happening. So how does the DNS server know what the right IP? address is. The DNS system is organized in a hierarchical fashion like a tree diagram. Above the individual DNS server are organizations that issue domain names. Companies like GoDaddy and many other companies issue domain names for top-level domains. Top-level domains includes the ones you're familiar with, such as dot com, dot net, dot edu, as well as national top-level domain such as dot-ca, dot-uK, etc. Every top-level domain has its own master server, which has all the information from which the lower DNS servers get their data from.

So what sits on top of the top-level domains on the DNS network? At the very top of everything, the organization which is responsible for the DNS system and the organization which is ultimately responsible for issuing all the IP addresses is ICANN, the Internet Corporation for assigned names and numbers. ICANN runs the root servers for the entire DNS system. All of these DNS servers use a form of encrypted signature that verifies the trustworthiness of each DNS server below it. ICANN has a cryptographic signature on which everything else is dependent.

These signatures consist of a public key, which everyone can see, and a private key, which, as the name would suggest, is private. Private keys are held on devices known as secure hardware security modules, or HSMs, which are kept inside safes in two facilities. Two each are stored in Culpepper, Virginia, and El Segundo, California. Each HSM is physically resistant to tampering. If someone were to try to open it or even move it too much, it would automatically shut down. So what would happen if all four of the HSMs were to fail? What would happen to the internet? The master keys can be recreated. In fact, this process happens every three months in what's known as a key signing ceremony. To create a new key, smart cards are required. Each smart card is held in a safe, and each safe is opened with a unique

key, each of which is held by seven different people from around the world. Each person, known as a trusted community representative, is a technical expert from a different country, and their names are publicly listed on the ICANN website. Each key signing ceremony is a highly organized affair with over 100 steps that have to be followed. The ceremony takes place in an ultra-secure facility with multiple layers of security just to get in. This includes pin codes, smart cards, and biometric scans. Something you know, something you have, and something you are. During the ceremony, all unnecessary staff leave the building. The signing ceremony is actually held inside of a Faraday cage. There are witnesses for each key signing ceremony who are invited.

They are presented with a hash of the private key. This is a code that can verify the key, but can't determine what the key is. The reason for all of the first, the security and protocol is trust. Ultimately, everyone has to trust the secure keys which are at the top of everything. So, you can think of the seven keyholders as having the ability to reboot the internet if something were to go wrong. That makes them some of the most important people in the world. The entire internet works pretty seamlessly most of the time. When you're surfing the internet, it's really easy to forget that all of the billions of devices all over the world are all dependent on a few computers sitting in El Segundo, California.

The associate producer of Everything Everywhere daily is Thor Thompson. If you'd like to support the show, please donate over at patreon.com. There is content only available to supporters, merchandise, and even opportunities for a show producer credit. If you know someone you think would enjoy the show, please share it with them. Also remember, if you leave a five-star review, I'll read your review on the show.