The Internet was, in fact, not invented by Al Gore. If one could bestow the invention of the Internet onto a single person, this person would be Jon Postel. However, he is not considered as the inventor of the Internet. By most, he is considered the first Guardian of the Internet.
The key to the Internet's success is that these millions of computers are able to communicate to one another without disrupting the communications of other computers trying to accomplish the same thing. At the core of that success is the Internet Protocol (IP). Another essential part of the Internet is the lack of central control, and the absence of any third-party approval—be it governmental or corporate—before one may communicate.
The Internet is an international network. It is not owned by any organization. And though some governments would like to believe otherwise, it is not under the control of any national or international governmental body either. No single individual or company dictates how the Internet should be run or evolve, and no single restrictive non-free patented technology is necessary to communicate using the Internet. For this to continue, many parties need to agree on protocols, and on top of that, need to recognize and adhere to these protocols. These protocols usually have many options, which all parties communicating need to agree upon. Compare this to the 'car driving' protocol, where everyone agrees to stop for a red light, and to continue on a green light.
These formal registrations used to be maintained by one man, Jon Postel. The task was later delegated to a more formal group of technology people, the Internet Assigned Number Authority, IANA. In 1998 the US Department of Commerce (DoC) released two policy documents that called for the creation of a new body to govern these core functions of the Internet, which led to the creation of the Internet Committee for Assigned Names and Numbers, ICANN.
ICANN's creation was not very well received internationally, as it gave the US full control over the root of the Internet. As such, worldwide engineers largely ignored this non-technical political organization. An attempt was made to gain more widespread acceptance by reforming ICANN. Though this process started in 1998, it took years to complete. A famous Green Paper and White Paper with recommendations were written, leading to a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between ICANN and the DoC.
The 'ICANN at large' program, which allowed every individual to participate with ICANN and elect three board members, took two years to set up and was launched in 2000.
Two of these newly elected directors—Karl Auerbach, a legal scholar and Internet veteran who had been involved with the Internet before the Internet Protocol existed and Andreas Mueller‑Maguhn from the German hacker community Chaos Computer Club—tried to get a true reform going but they were instantly blocked by the directors that had not been elected by the public. They were not even allowed to see the books of the organization they represented, and for which they were formally held responsible for.
The Electronic Freedom Frontier (EFF), a digital rights organization, assisted Auerbach so he could sue the Board of Directors in 2002. After he won the case, ICANN squirmed until finally a judge ordered ICANN to allow all the directors to see the books. However, while ICANN stalled handing out this information, it changed its own rules and more or less fired the At Large elected directors instead. It was pretty much apparent that ICANN was to be kept a US-only affair, and the international Internet community responded in a way that became typical of the Internet. It started to collectively maneuver around ICANN.
ICANN was supposed to handle three separate tasks: protocol registrations, IP address allocation, and top-level domain (TLD) management.
Protocol registrations are really done by the IETF and IANA, and ICANN just stamps its approval. It completely lacks the skill or desire to interfere with this process.
The IP address allocation is really done by the Regional Internet Registries (RIRs), which are pro-actively ignoring ICANN completely. This became painfully obvious when the three major RIRs, ARIN (for North America and South America), RIPE (for Europe, Africa, and the Middle East), and APNIC (Asia and the Southern Pacific), set up the Number Resource Organization (NRO). They no longer acknowledged ICANN as the central authority for handing out IP allocations to the RIRs. It was nothing less than a coup d'état.
For technical reasons, there should not be more than thirteen name servers for any given domain, including the root. Otherwise, a DNS query answer would not fit into a single UDP packet, greatly delaying the answer of DNS requests. These name servers, eleven in the US and two in Europe, were historically placed at locations with the best Internet connectivity. They were run by volunteers, often at the big universities. When ICANN formally received control, they only actually got control of one of these root name servers, the so called 'A' root server, although this is the ultimate master root server. The other twelve servers are set up to pull data from the 'A' server. The 'A' server is currently run for ICANN by Verisign.
The reliance of the entire Internet on only thirteen servers has been a major concern for those involved in Internet design. A new protocol was created, called ANYCAST. In essence, it allows an IP address to exist at multiple places at once, and a computer requesting that IP address will be directed to the nearest ANYCAST IP address. The most important non-US root server, 'K', is run by RIPE-NCC, the operational branch of RIPE. Using ANYCAST, it currently resides in multiple places, including the two biggest conglomerations of Internet connections, LINX in London and the AMSIX in Amsterdam. An important side effect of ANYCAST was that the international community is no longer as dependent on the 11 of the 13 root servers that are based in the US and which are still in large part formally under government control. It has greatly reduced ICANN's influence over the root. The 'K' root server is a prime candidate to split off from the 'A' server if for some technical or political reason such a change becomes necessary.
ICANN is left with only the top-level domain management. This task is perhaps the most politically loaded task, and not as technologically neutral as handing out IP addresses or Internet protocol numbers or running the root name servers.
There are two kinds of TLDs, country code TLDs ("cc:tld") and generic TLDs ("gtld"). The cc:tlds are fairly straightforward. There are already international ISO procedures for this. Every country receives a two or three letter representation. The US has 'us', the Netherlands has 'nl', and China has 'ch'. These translate one to one to the top-level domains, .us, .nl, and .ch respectively.
ICANN has no real say in this matter either. Whether Taiwan is recognized as a separate country or as a Chinese province, for instance, is not something that ICANN or even the US government will have the final say on.
What's left under ICANN's control is management of the generic top-level domains. The most common ones are .com, .net, and .org. ICANN created a few more, such as .info, .biz, and .museum. But after the 'dot com' hype was over and Internet stock lost its magic (and power), no one was really interested in these obscure generic TLDs. For a few years, no new ones were created. Then in mid-2005, ICANN was about to approve the top-level domain .xxx for adult websites. The US Department of Commerce, under pressure from the religious-influenced Bush administration, forbade ICANN from doing this, for the first time using their formal control over ICANN.
The issue threw the public spotlight onto the government's influence over ICANN. There was a national and international call for a truly independent body to take its place, perhaps UN-based. Whether such politics will have any real technical effect on the Internet is not known, but it is not unthinkable that the root as we know it now will cease to exist, to be replaced by several new roots, under the control of various international organizations.
One thing that is clear is that Internet governance is set to change, affecting the creation of new top-level domains and the creation or deletion of cc-tlds. The creation of .biz and .info has been largely ignored on the Internet as a whole, and a similar fate is to be expected for the newly approved .mobi domain, a domain intended for mobile phone content. Some see these domains as milk cows for ICANN. Even Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, was strongly opposed to this domain, as it broke a fundamental paradigm of the Web, namely that content should have a proper device-neutral markup so that any device can decide how best to display the information. The .eu domain, originally planned for EU organizations, will soon be opened for everyone, but whether it will become an alternative for .com is unknown. Lastly, we should not forget the grassroots community that was responsible for creating the Internet. The technicians still have a remarkable influence envied by the political powers.