This article is about the worldwide computer network. For other uses, see Internet (disambiguation).
Not to be confused with the World Wide Web.
Internet
Visualization of Internet routing paths
An Opte Project visualization of routing paths through a portion of the Internet
General[show]
Governance[show]
Information infrastructure[show]
Services[show]
Guides[show]
Portal icon Internet portal
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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.
The origins of the Internet date back to research commissioned by the United States federal government in the 1960s to build robust, fault-tolerant communication via computer networks.[1] The primary precursor network, the ARPANET, initially served as a backbone for interconnection of regional academic and military networks in the 1980s. The funding of the National Science Foundation Network as a new backbone in the 1980s, as well as private funding for other commercial extensions, led to worldwide participation in the development of new networking technologies, and the merger of many networks.[2] The linking of commercial networks and enterprises by the early 1990s marks the beginning of the transition to the modern Internet,[3] and generated a sustained exponential growth as generations of institutional, personal, and mobile computers were connected to the network.
Although the Internet has been widely used by academia since the 1980s, the commercialization incorporated its services and technologies into virtually every aspect of modern life. Internet use grew rapidly in the West from the mid-1990s and from the late 1990s in the developing world.[4] 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.[5][6]
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.[7] 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.[8]
Contents [hide]
1 Terminology
2 History
3 Governance
4 Infrastructure
4.1 Routing and service tiers
4.2 Access
4.3 Structure
5 Protocols
6 Services
6.1 World Wide Web
6.2 Communication
6.3 Data transfer
7 Social impact
7.1 Users
7.2 Usage
7.3 Social networking and entertainment
7.4 Electronic business
7.5 Telecommuting
7.6 Crowdsourcing
7.7 Collaborative publishing
7.8 Politics and political revolutions
7.9 Philanthropy
8 Security
8.1 Surveillance
8.2 Censorship
9 Performance
9.1 Outages
9.2 Energy use
10 See also
11 References
12 Further reading
13 External links
Terminology
The Internet Messenger by Buky Schwartz in Holon.
See also: Capitalization of "Internet"
The term Internet, when used to refer to the specific global system of interconnected Internet Protocol (IP) networks, is a proper noun[9] and may be written with an initial capital letter. In common use and the media, it is often not capitalized, viz. the internet. Some guides specify that the word should be capitalized when used as a noun, but not capitalized when used as an adjective.[10]
The Internet is also often referred to as the Net, as a short form of network.
Historically, as early as 1849, the word internetted was used uncapitalized as an adjective, meaning Interconnected or interwoven.[11] The designers of early computer networks used internet both as a noun and as a verb in shorthand form of internetwork or internetworking, meaning interconnecting computer networks.[12]
The terms Internet and World Wide Web are often used interchangeably in everyday speech; it is common to speak of "going on the Internet" when invoking a web browser to view web pages. However, the World Wide Web or the Web is only one of a large number of Internet services. The Web is a collection of interconnected documents (web pages) and other web resources, linked by hyperlinks and URLs.[13] As another point of comparison, Hypertext Transfer Protocol, or HTTP, is the language used on the Web for information transfer, yet it is just one of many languages or protocols that can be used for communication on the Internet.[14]
The term Interweb is a portmanteau of Internet and World Wide Web typically used sarcastically to parody a technically unsavvy user.
History
Main articles: History of the Internet and History of the World Wide Web
Research into packet switching started in the early 1960s,[15] and packet switched networks such as the ARPANET, CYCLADES,[16][17] the Merit Network,[18] NPL network,[19] Tymnet, and Telenet, were developed in the late 1960s and 1970s using a variety of protocols.[20] The ARPANET project led to the development of protocols for internetworking, by which multiple separate networks could be joined into a single network of networks.[21]
ARPANET development began with two network nodes which were interconnected between the Network Measurement Center at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science directed by Leonard Kleinrock, and the NLS system at SRI International (SRI) by Douglas Engelbart in Menlo Park, California, on 29 October 1969.[22] The third site was the Culler-Fried Interactive Mathematics Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara, followed by the University of Utah Graphics Department. In an early sign of future growth, fifteen sites were connected to the young ARPANET by the end of 1971.[23][24] These early years were documented in the 1972 film Computer Networks: The Heralds of Resource Sharing.
Early international collaborations on the ARPANET were rare. European developers were concerned with developing the X.25 networks.[25] Notable exceptions were the Norwegian Seismic Array (NORSAR) in June 1973, followed in 1973 by Sweden with satellite links to the Tanum Earth Station and Peter T. Kirstein's research group in the United Kingdom, initially at the Institute of Computer Science, University of London and later at University College London.[26][27][28]
In December 1974, RFC 675 (Specification of Internet Transmission Control Program), by Vinton Cerf, Yogen Dalal, and Carl Sunshine, used the term internet as a shorthand for internetworking and later RFCs repeated this use.[29] Access to the ARPANET was expanded in 1981 when the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded the Computer Science Network (CSNET). In 1982, the Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP) was standardized, which permitted worldwide proliferation of interconnected networks.
T3 NSFNET Backbone, c. 1992.
TCP/IP network access expanded again in 1986 when the National Science Foundation Network (NSFNet) provided access to supercomputer sites in the United States for researchers, first at speeds of 56 kbit/s and later at 1.5 Mbit/s and 45 Mbit/s.[30] Commercial Internet service providers (ISPs) emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The ARPANET was decommissioned in 1990. By 1995, the Internet was fully commercialized in the U.S. when the NSFNet was decommissioned, removing the last restrictions on use of the Internet to carry commercial traffic.[31] The Internet rapidly expanded in Europe and Australia in the mid to late 1980s[32][33] and to Asia in the late 1980s and early 1990s.[34]
The beginning of dedicated transatlantic communication between the NSFNET and networks in Europe was established with a low-speed satellite relay between Princeton University and Stockholm, Sweden in December 1988.[35] Although other network protocols such as UUCP had global reach well before this time, this marked the beginning of the Internet as an intercontinental network.
Slightly over a year later in March 1990, the first high-speed T1 (1.5 Mbit/s) link between the NSFNET and Europe was installed between Cornell University and CERN, allowing much more robust communications than were capable with satellites.[36] Six months later Tim Berners-Lee would begin writing WorldWideWeb, the first web browser after two years of lobbying CERN management. By Christmas 1990, Berners-Lee had built all the tools necessary for a working Web: the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) 0.9,[37] the HyperText Markup Language (HTML), the first Web browser (which was also a HTML editor and could access Usenet newsgroups and FTP files), the first HTTP server software (later known as CERN httpd), the first web server (http://info.cern.ch), and the first Web pages that described the project itself.
Since 1995 the Internet has tremendously impacted culture and commerce, including the rise of near instant communication by email, instant messaging, telephony (Voice over Internet Protocol or VoIP), two-way interactive video calls, and the World Wide Web[38] with its discussion forums, blogs, social networking, and online shopping sites. Increasing amounts of data are transmitted at higher and higher speeds over fiber optic networks operating at 1-Gbit/s, 10-Gbit/s, or more.
Worldwide Internet users
2005 2010 2014a
World population[39] 6.5 billion 6.9 billion 7.2 billion
Not using the Internet 84% 70% 60%
Using the Internet 16% 30% 40%
Users in the developing world 8% 21% 32%
Users in the developed world 51% 67% 78%
a Estimate.
Source: International Telecommunications Union.[40]
The Internet continues to grow, driven by ever greater amounts of online information and knowledge, commerce, entertainment and social networking.[41] During the late 1990s, it was estimated that traffic on the public Internet grew by 100 percent per year, while the mean annual growth in the number of Internet users was thought to be between 20% and 50%.[42] This growth is often attributed to the lack of central administration, which allows organic growth of the network, as well as the non-proprietary nature of the Internet protocols, which encourages vendor interoperability and prevents any one company from exerting too much control over the network.[43] As of 31 March 2011, the estimated total number of Internet users was 2.095 billion (30.2% of world population).[44] It is estimated that in 1993 the Internet carried only 1% of the information flowing through two-way telecommunication, by 2000 this figure had grown to 51%, and by 2007 more than 97% of all telecommunicated information was carried over the Internet.[45]
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