Who owns the internet? Who do we pay to use it and why?
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No one owns it.
The reason you pay for it is data centres cost money to run.
What your paying for is the internet provider to maintain the cable from your house to their data centre.
Then your paying for the energy to run the data centre, and the ISP services (billing, content servers(Netflix, YouTube, etc).
But the main cost is the links to the other ISP’s and the content providers. (Called peering)
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