The first thing to understand is that blockchain is a technology and was originally created when Bitcoin was first launched in January 2009. Equally, there are two types of blokchain - private and public. The private blockchains one usually owned by a consortia of organisations that know each other - e.g. the R3 consortia of banks.
Public blockchains are slightly different.
Much as it sounds very weird - the original bitcoin blockchain is not owned by any single individual, by any government or any corporation - it is owned by the bitcoin community itself. The software behind bitcoin is open source, with the security for the bitcoin blockchain provided by what is known as miners - around 5,500 globally who all compete with each other to solve a cryptographic puzzle that seals a block of data together. When sealed, a bicoin is produced and sent to the miner that successfully solved the puzzle. Each miner also has a copy of every transaction that has ever occured on the bitcoin blockchain - with the ledger housing each transaction standing currently at just over 100 GB in size. As a result, the bitcoin blockchain is purely based on the internet but not controlled by anyone, just the bitcoin protocol that runs it.
Merkle Trees were invented and patented in 1979. Hash lists were combined with Merkel trees in 1992. This formed the core data structure from which, in 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto created the consensus protocol that became Bitcoin. Blockchain has become synonymous with Bitcoin, but the history goes back much further.