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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is about the worldwide computer network. For the global system of pages
accessed through URLs via the Internet, see World Wide Web. For other uses,
see Internet (disambiguation).
"The Internet" redirects here. For the American music group, see The Internet
(band). For the song Welcome To The Internet, see Bo Burnham: Inside.
"Interweb" redirects here. For the song by Poppy, see Interweb (song).

Internet

An Opte Project visualization of routing paths through a

portion of the Internet

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General

 Access
 Activism
 Censorship
 Data activism
 Democracy
 Digital divide
 Digital rights
 Freedom
 Freedom of information
 Internet phenomena
 Net neutrality
  Privacy
 Right to Internet access
 Slacktivism
 Sociology
 Usage
 Vigilantism
 Virtual community
 Virtual volunteering

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Governance
 IGF
 NRO
 IANA
 ICANN
 IETF
 ISOC

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Information infrastructure
 Domain Name System
 Hypertext Transfer Protocol
 Internet exchange point
 Internet protocol suite
 Internet Protocol
 Transmission Control Protocol
 Internet service provider
 IP address
 Internet Message Access Protocol
 Simple Mail Transfer Protocol

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Services
 Blogs
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  Shopping
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 Voice over IP
 World Wide Web
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History
 History of the Internet
 Oldest domain names
 Pioneers
 Protocol Wars

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Computer network types

by scale

 Nanonetwork
 Near-field (NFC)
 Body
 Personal (PAN)
 Near-me
 Local (LAN)
 Storage (SAN)
 Wireless (WLAN)
  Virtual (VLAN)
 Home (HAN)
 Campus (CAN)
 Backbone
 Metropolitan (MAN)
 Municipal wireless (MWN)
 Wide (WAN)
 Cloud
 Internet
 Interplanetary Internet

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The Internet (or internet)[a] is the global system of interconnected computer

networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP)[b] to communicate between
networks and devices. It is a network of networks that consists 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 a vast range of information resources and services, such as the
interlinked hypertext documents and applications of the World Wide
Web (WWW), electronic mail, internet telephony, and file sharing.

The origins of the Internet date back to research that enabled the time-sharing of
computer resources, the development of packet switching in the 1960s and the
design of computer networks for data communication.[2][3] The set of rules
(communication protocols) to enable internetworking on the Internet arose from
research and development commissioned in the 1970s by the Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency (DARPA) of the United States Department of Defense in
collaboration with universities and researchers across the United States and in
the United Kingdom and France.[4][5][6] The ARPANET initially served as a backbone
for the interconnection of regional academic and military networks in the United
States to enable resource sharing. The funding of the National Science Foundation
Network as a new backbone in the 1980s, as well as private funding for other
commercial extensions, encouraged worldwide participation in the development of
new networking technologies and the merger of many networks using
DARPA's Internet protocol suite.[7] The linking of commercial networks and
enterprises by the early 1990s, as well as the advent of the World Wide
Web,[8] marked the beginning of the transition to the modern Internet, [9] and generated
sustained exponential growth as generations of institutional, personal,
and mobile computers were connected to the internetwork. Although the Internet was
widely used by academia in the 1980s, the subsequent commercialization of the
Internet in the 1990s and beyond incorporated its services and technologies into
virtually every aspect of modern life.

Most traditional communication media, including telephone, radio, television, paper

mail, and newspapers, are reshaped, redefined, or even bypassed by the Internet,
giving birth to new services such as email, Internet telephone, Internet radio, Internet
television, online music, digital newspapers, and audio and video
streaming websites. Newspapers, books, and other print publishing have adapted
to website technology or have been reshaped into blogging, web feeds, and
online news aggregators. The Internet has enabled and accelerated new forms of
personal interaction through instant messaging, Internet forums, and social
networking services. Online shopping has grown exponentially for major
retailers, small businesses, and entrepreneurs, as it enables firms to extend their
"brick and mortar" presence to serve a larger market or even sell goods and services
entirely online. Business-to-business and financial services on the Internet
affect supply chains across entire industries.

The Internet has no single centralized governance in either technological

implementation or policies for access and usage; each constituent network sets its
own policies.[10] The overarching definitions of the two principal name spaces on the
Internet, the Internet Protocol address (IP 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] In November
2006, the Internet was included on USA Today's list of the New Seven Wonders.[12]

Terminology
Further information: Capitalization of Internet and internetworking
The word internetted was used as early as 1849,
meaning interconnected or interwoven.[13] The word Internet was used in 1945 by the
United States War Department in a radio operator's manual, [14] and in 1974 as the
shorthand form of Internetwork.[15] Today, the term Internet most commonly refers to
the global system of interconnected computer networks, though it may also refer to
any group of smaller networks.[16]

When it came into common use, most publications treated the word Internet as a
capitalized proper noun; this has become less common.[16] This reflects the tendency
in English to capitalize new terms and move them to lowercase as they become
familiar.[16][17] The word is sometimes still capitalized to distinguish the global internet
from smaller networks, though many publications, including the AP Stylebook since
2016, recommend the lowercase form in every case. [16][17] In 2016, the Oxford English
Dictionary found that, based on a study of around 2.5 billion printed and online
sources, "Internet" was capitalized in 54% of cases. [18]

The terms Internet and World Wide Web are often used interchangeably; it is
common to speak of "going on the Internet" when using 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,[19] a collection of documents (web pages) and other web
resources linked by hyperlinks and URLs.[20]

History
Main articles: History of the Internet, History of the World Wide Web, and Protocol
Wars

A sketch of the ARPANET in December 1969. The

nodes at UCLA and the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) are among those
depicted.[21]
In the 1960s, computer scientists began developing systems for time-sharing of
computer resources.[22][23] J. C. R. Licklider proposed the idea of a universal network
while working at Bolt Beranek & Newman and, later, leading the Information
Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) at the Advanced Research Projects
Agency (ARPA) of the United States Department of Defense (DoD). Research
into packet switching, one of the fundamental Internet technologies, started in the
work of Paul Baran at RAND in the early 1960s and, independently, Donald
Davies at the United Kingdom's National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in 1965.[2][24] After
the Symposium on Operating Systems Principles in 1967, packet switching from the
proposed NPL network and routing concepts proposed by Baran were incorporated
into the design of the ARPANET, an experimental resource sharing network
proposed by ARPA.[25][26][27]

ARPANET development began with two network nodes which were interconnected
between the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and the Stanford
Research Institute (now SRI International) on 29 October 1969. [28] The third site was
at the University of California, Santa Barbara, followed by the University of Utah. In a
sign of future growth, 15 sites were connected to the young ARPANET by the end of
1971.[29][30] These early years were documented in the 1972 film Computer Networks:
The Heralds of Resource Sharing.[31] Thereafter, the ARPANET gradually developed
into a decentralized communications network, connecting remote centers and
military bases in the United States.[32] Other user networks and research networks,
such as the Merit Network and CYCLADES, were developed in the late 1960s and
early 1970s.[33]

Early international collaborations for the ARPANET were rare. Connections were
made in 1973 to Norway (NORSAR and NDRE),[34] and to Peter Kirstein's research
group at University College London (UCL), which provided a gateway to British
academic networks, forming the first internetwork for resource sharing.[35] ARPA
projects, the International Network Working Group and commercial initiatives led to
the development of various protocols and standards by which multiple separate
networks could become a single network or "a network of networks".[36] In 1974, Vint
Cerf at Stanford University and Bob Kahn at DARPA published a proposal for "A
Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication". [37] They used the term internet as a
shorthand for internetwork in RFC 675,[15] and later RFCs repeated this use. Cerf and
Kahn credit Louis Pouzin and others with important influences on the
resulting TCP/IP design.[37][38] National PTTs and commercial providers developed
the X.25 standard and deployed it on public data networks.[39]

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 facilitated worldwide
proliferation of interconnected networks. 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.[40] The NSFNet expanded into
academic and research organizations in Europe, Australia, New Zealand and Japan
in 1988–89.[41][42][43][44] Although other network protocols such as UUCP and PTT public
data networks had global reach well before this time, this marked the beginning of
the Internet as an intercontinental network. Commercial Internet service
providers (ISPs) emerged in 1989 in the United States and Australia. [45] The
ARPANET was decommissioned in 1990.[46