Puppet Masters of the Internet

When these ten guys pull the power strings of the Internet, everyone jumps. By Dan Tynan, PCWorld Apr 30, 2012 8:19 pm Nearly everyone on the Internet knows about Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos. Savvy geeks might even recognize Internet pioneers like Vint Cerf and Marc Andreessen. But among the most powerful people on the Net are individuals whose names are unknown to the teeming masses on the InterWebs. Some of them control vital pieces of Internet infrastructure. Others decide which companies get funded, which websites get the lion's share of the traffic, or whether sites will live to see another day. Who really rules the Net? Read on. Just don't get on the bad side of any of these ten power gurus. Matt Cutts Matt CuttsOfficial title: Principal engineer at Google Secret identity: Search ninja As head of Google's Search Quality (anti-Web-spam) team, Cutts is the guy who decides whether your website gets chucked down into the basement of Google page rankings for being too "spammy." Over the past two years, Google has changed its search algorithms several times to lower the position of content farms, scrapers, ad-heavy pages, and other less worthy sites in Google's search results. Why you shouldn't mess with him: One day you're king of the Google hill; the next day your site's holding a one-way ticket to Palookaville--and all it takes is a tweak of an algorithm. Lawrence E. Strickling Lawrence E. Strickling--Photo: Courtesy of the NTIAOfficial title: Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Communications and Information Secret identity: The root master Strickling may look like a typical federal bureaucrat, but as chief of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) he wields ultimate authority over the 13 DNS Root Servers that direct all of the Internet's traffic. Type www.pcworld.com into your browser, and these machines translate it into an Internet protocol address (70.42.185.10) that Web servers can understand. Why you shouldn't mess with him: Repressive governments often use DNS filtering to block access to websites that they don't approve of--and such filtering also happened to be a key part of the SOPA and PIPA bills recently debated in the U.S. Congress. Yishan Wong Yishan Wong--Photo: Courtesy of VentureBeatOfficial title: CEO of Reddit Secret identity: Web traffic controller Reddit has surpassed Digg and Slashdot as the preeminent uber-geek aggregation site on the Web, thanks in large part to its role in initiating the "Internet Blackout" to protest SOPA and PIPA earlier this year. A member of the elite Silicon Valley PayPal Mafia, as well as former director of engineering at Facebook, Wong is also a consigliere at Quora, the question/answer social network. Why you shouldn't mess with him: If Reddit loves your site you're flooded with traffic. If it doesn't? Look what happened to SOPA and PIPA. Rod Beckstrom Rod Beckstrom--Photo: Courtesy of WikipediaOfficial title: President and CEO of ICANN Secret identity: Master of all domains As head honcho of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), Beckstrom wields ultimate control over which top-level domains (for example, .com, .edu, and .biz) get approved. This year ICANN plans to expand the current number of TLDs from 22 to possibly hundreds, providing a massive economic boost for major domain registrars--some of whom sit on ICANN's board. Beckstrom will retire as CEO in July after accusing his fellow board members of ethical conflicts. Why you shouldn't mess with him: With a few months left on the job, Beckstrom's got nothing to lose. And though ICANN has yet to name his successor, we understand Voldemort, Darth Vader, and Dr. Evil have all applied for the job. Douglas Cutting Douglas Cutting--Photo: Courtesy of WikipediaOfficial title: Architect at Cloudera Secret identity: Open sourceror This open-source search guru is the creator of Hadoop, software that lets geeks manipulate massive amounts of data across multiple machines--creating the Big Data revolution that lets banks, telecom companies, social networks, and the government know more about you than they ever did before. He is also chair of the Apache Software Foundation, which oversees the open-source server software that two-thirds of the world's websites use. Why you shouldn't mess with him: He's a virtual one-man Google. Read the Rest Here:
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