Who owns the Internet?

No particular group or organisation owns the Internet.

It is actually a worldwide network that links many other networks together.

Volunteer groups of individuals set some standards for Internet technologies, and these standards are free for anybody to use. This is why it has been possible to make the Internet available to hundreds of millions of people around the world in such a short time. It would not have been possible if the various technologies were proprietary or if there were many different technologies.

However, the physical infrastructure of cables and routers is owned by governments, corporations, internet service providers, telecommunications companies and other organisations. You pay for this in a number of ways. The fees you pay your internet service provider for access to the internet pays for their infrastructure; if you have a domain name those fees go towards maintaining the naming system which is the backbone of finding information on the internet; and if you have a website those fees pay for the hosting infrastructure that makes information available to others.