How Nonprofits Run the Internet
With the near-constant stream of advertisements, sponsored content, and brand deals we see every day online, it can start to feel like the Internet is all about profit. While it is true that a lot of people make money on the Internet, nonprofits are actually at the heart of keeping it running.
Around the world, there are countless nonprofits focused on various components of the Internet. There are many that help build infrastructure to expand Internet access, advocate for users’ rights online, create tools and standards that help keep us more secure, and many other activities that all build on each other to create a better Internet for everyone.
There are even a handful of nonprofits in the Internet community that manage a lot of the unseen work that makes the Internet function. They are critical for ensuring that networks on the Internet have unique addresses and that people can read those addresses. Without them, we would not be able to send emails, register new websites, or even access existing ones.
If the Internet is a city, think of these nonprofits as creators of both the numerical postal codes, as well as the easier-to-remember street and house numbers that the postal codes translate to.
What Are Some Prominent Internet Nonprofits?
It would be impossible to list every nonprofit that helps run the Internet, but here are just a few that manage some of the invisible functions that keep the Internet running smoothly.
Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)
Since 1998, the people at ICANN have made it so that you can type the name of your favorite restaurant into your toolbar and have it take you where you want to go, without having to look at the code beneath it and enter a long numeric key.
ICANN oversees the global domain name system (DNS), which links unique domain names (like internetsociety.org!) with sites’ Internet protocol (IP) addresses—numerical identifiers associated with devices that connect to the Internet. In essence, you get to speak human, and the machine gets to speak machine—everyone wins!
Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA)
This organization is run by ICANN and speaks machine. They are responsible for the unique numeric codes (or IP addresses) that we get to ignore, but are crucial for Internet functionality.
Fun Fact: The first director of IANA was Jon Postel, who was also the first member of the Internet Society! We even have an award to honor his legacy.
IANA is responsible for each country having a unique, two-digit identifier for site names, called a country code top-level domain (ccTLD). For sites that do not fit into a specific country, there are generic top-level domains (gTLDs). These are websites that end in .com, .org, or anything after the dot that isn’t country-specific.
Regional Internet Registries (RIRs)
Remember how machines use numbers to speak ‘machine language’ to each other? Well, regional Internet registries manage them.
These number resources include IP addresses and autonomous system numbers (ASNs)—numerical identifiers associated with a large network or group of networks (autonomous system).
There are five of these registries around the world, and they are all members of the Numbers Resource Organization, their central organizing body.
How Are These Nonprofits Funded?
The activities and services of these nonprofits underpin the very foundation and functionality of the Internet, but how can they afford to operate if their goal isn’t to make money?
There are several funding models that nonprofits may follow. Many of them, including ICANN and the RIRs, charge service fees to register domain names, which helps cover operational costs. They may also supplement this by accepting grants and donations.
Other nonprofits are funded by…other nonprofits! ICANN, for instance, funds IANA, and the Internet Society is funded in part by the Public Interest Registry, a nonprofit that manages the .org domain.
With that funding, we, in turn, help fund other nonprofits through our grant programs, such as our Expanding Potential in Communities (EPIC) Grant. The cycle goes on!
The Vital Role of Volunteers
Many nonprofits rely on volunteers’ invaluable work to enact change in their online and offline communities. Our 120+ active global chapters, for instance, are completely volunteer-driven.
Wikipedia, managed by the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, is the world’s largest reference website. The site’s more than 64 million articles were almost entirely written by volunteers, and anyone can help edit and build the site’s content.
The open-source community is a global network of volunteers who develop source code for software and other programs and make it freely accessible online.
Firefox, for example, is a free and open-source web browser created by the nonprofit Mozilla and developed by volunteers. Firefox was made to prioritize privacy and was the first program to introduce browser tabs.
Even the voluntary Internet standards that shape the way the Internet works are developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in an open standards process by volunteers in the technical community.
While businesses operate to make money, volunteers do what they do out of their own passion and genuine interest in improving the Internet for all.
What Would the Internet Look Like Without Nonprofits?
Without nonprofits, the Internet would be even more commercialized than it already is. It could also cease to be global, as nonprofits and their volunteers do the heavy lifting of ensuring that services are available even in markets that are not profitable for corporations.
Many of these nonprofits also have bottom-up, consensus-based decision-making mechanisms, which preserve the multistakeholder model and allow more people in the Internet community to have a say in how it runs. None of these organizations implement unilateral decisions.
The Internet already faces major threats from governments, influential corporations, and other parties. With all these competing interests, we need nonprofits to defend the Internet.
The Bottom Line
Nonprofits are an essential part of the Internet ecosystem, and they exist to advance the Internet as a force for good in the world.
As our co-founder, Vint Cerf, said in 1999, “The Internet is for everyone—but it won’t be until in every home, in every business, in every school, in every town and every country on the globe, Internet can be accessed without limitation, at any time and in every language.”