content: It was designed against nukes taking out nodes, with that in mind it is robust against failures of a lot of nodes in the system but they never could protect against subversion of the system itself. To give an example only a few people set up the standard for ipv6. Due to the changes with it any ipv6 user is way easier unique identified than with ipv4 and this is a global standard that every internet user is affected by. So wouldn't you say they had significant control? And there are plenty of such chokepoints in the whole structure that allow wide influence.