Can you beleive that the World Wide Web is being controled by only Seven People. sounds like science fiction wright, individuals from all over the world, together control security at the core of the web.
The keyholders have been meeting four times a year, twice on the east coast of the US and twice on the wes of the UK, since 2010. Each one of them hold a key to the internet, Together, their keys create a master key, which in turn controls one of the central security measures at the core of the web.
They are a select group of security experts from around the world. All have long backgrounds in internet security and work for various international institutions. They were chosen for their geographical spread as well as their experience, and no country is allowed to have too many keyholders.
They control the system at the heart of the web: the domain name system, or DNS. This is the internet's version of a telephone directory, a series of registers linking web addresses to a series of numbers, called IP addresses. Without these addresses, you would need to know a long sequence of numbers for every site you wanted to visit. For exemple To get to the Guardian, for instance, you'd have to enter 77.91.251.10 instead of theguardian.com.
There is another Backup which is another seven people around the world who could access a last-resort measure to reconstruct the system if something calamitous were to happen.
Each of the 14 primary keyholders owns a traditional metal key to a safety deposit box, which in turn contains a smartcard, which in turn activates a machine that creates a new master key. The backup keyholders have something a bit different: smartcards that contain a fragment of code needed to build a replacement key-generating machine. Once a year, these shadow holders send the organisation that runs the system, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers Icann, a photograph of themselves with that day's newspaper and their key, to verify that all is well.
theguardian
