Internet
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Visualization from the
Opte Project of the various routes through a portion of the Internet
The
Internet is a global system of interconnected
computer networks that use the standard
Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP) to serve billions of users worldwide. It is a
network of networks that consists of millions of private, public, academic, business, and government networks, of local to global scope, that are linked by a broad array of electronic and optical networking technologies. The Internet carries a vast range of
information resources and services, such as the inter-linked
hypertext documents of the
World Wide Web (WWW) and the infrastructure to support
electronic mail.
Most traditional communications media including telephone, music, film, and television are being reshaped or redefined by the Internet. Newspaper, book and other print publishing are having to adapt to
Web sites and
blogging. The Internet has enabled or accelerated new forms of human interactions through
instant messaging,
Internet forums, and
social networking.
Online shopping has boomed both for major retail outlets and small
artisans and traders.
Business-to-business and
financial services on the Internet affect
supply chains across entire industries.
The origins of the Internet reach back to the 1960s with both private and United States military research into robust, fault-tolerant, and distributed computer networks. The funding of a new U.S.
backbone by the
National Science Foundation, as well as private funding for other commercial backbones, led to worldwide participation in the development of new networking technologies, and the merger of many networks. The
commercialization of what was by then an international network in the mid 1990s resulted in its popularization and incorporation into virtually every aspect of modern human life. As of 2009, an estimated quarter of Earth's population used the services of the Internet.
The Internet has no centralized governance in either technological implementation or policies for access and usage; each constituent network sets its own standards. Only the overreaching definitions of the two principal
name spaces in the Internet, the
Internet Protocol address space and the
Domain Name System, are directed by a maintainer organization, the
Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). The technical underpinning and standardization of the core protocols (
IPv4 and
IPv6) 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.
