Internet

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is about the worldwide computer network. For other uses, see Internet
(disambiguation).
Not to be confused with the World Wide Web.

Internet

An Opte Project visualization of routing paths through a

portion of the Internet

General[show]
Governance[show]
Information infrastructure[show]
Services[show]
Guides[show]
Internet portal

The Internet is the global system of interconnected computer networks that use the Internet
protocol suite (TCP/IP) to link billions of devices worldwide. It is a network of networks that
consists of millions of private, public, academic, business, and government networks of local to
global scope, linked by a broad array of electronic, wireless, and optical networking
technologies. The Internet carries an extensive range of information resources and services, such
as the inter-linked hypertext documents and applications of the World Wide Web (WWW),
electronic mail, telephony, and peer-to-peer networks for file sharing.
Although the Internet protocol suite has been widely used by academia and the military industrial
complex since the early 1980s, events of the late 1980s and 1990s such as more powerful and
affordable computers, the advent of fiber optics, the popularization of HTTP and the Web
browser, and a push towards opening the technology to commerce eventually incorporated its
services and technologies into virtually every aspect of contemporary life.
The impact of the Internet has been so immense that it has been referred to as the "8th continent".
[1][2]

The origins of the Internet date back to research and development commissioned by the United
States government, the Government of the UK and France in the 1960s to build robust, faulttolerant communication via computer networks.[3][4][5][6] This work, led to the primary precursor
networks, the ARPANET, in the United States, the Mark 1 NPL network in the United Kingdom
and CYCLADES in France. The interconnection of regional academic networks in the 1980s
marks the beginning of the transition to the modern Internet.[7] From the late 1980s onward, the
network experienced sustained exponential growth as generations of institutional, personal, and
mobile computers were connected to it.
Internet use grew rapidly in the West from the mid-1990s and from the late 1990s in the
developing world. In the 20 years since 1995, Internet use has grown 100-times, measured for
the period of one year, to over one third of the world population.[8][9]
Most traditional communications media, including telephony and television, are being reshaped
or redefined by the Internet, giving birth to new services such as Internet telephony and Internet
television. Newspaper, book, and other print publishing are adapting to website technology, or
are reshaped into blogging and web feeds. The entertainment industry was initially the fastest
growing segment on the Internet.[citation needed] The Internet has enabled and accelerated new forms
of personal interactions through instant messaging, Internet forums, and social networking.
Online shopping has grown exponentially both for major retailers and small artisans and traders.
Business-to-business and financial services on the Internet affect supply chains across entire
industries.
The Internet has no centralized governance in either technological implementation or policies for
access and usage; each constituent network sets its own policies.[10] Only the overreaching
definitions of the two principal name spaces in the Internet, the Internet Protocol address space
and the Domain Name System (DNS), are directed by a maintainer organization, the Internet
Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). The technical underpinning and
standardization of the core protocols is an activity of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF),

a non-profit organization of loosely affiliated international participants that anyone may associate
with by contributing technical expertise.[11]