The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer
networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to link several
billion devices worldwide. It is an international network of networks that
consists of millions of private, public, academic, business, and government
packet switched networks, 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), the infrastructure to
support email, and peer-to-peer networks for file sharing and telephony.
The origins of the Internet date back to research
commissioned by the United States government in the 1960s to build robust,
fault-tolerant communication via computer networks. While this work, together
with work in the United Kingdom and France, led to important precursor
networks, they were not the Internet. There is no consensus on the exact date
when the modern Internet came into being, but sometime in the early to mid-1980s
is considered reasonable.From that point, the network experienced decades of
sustained exponential growth as generations of institutional, personal, and
mobile computers were connected to it.
The funding of a new U.S. backbone by the National Science
Foundation in the 1980s, 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. Though the Internet has been
widely used by academia since the 1980s, the commercialization of what was by
the 1990s an international network resulted in its popularization and
incorporation into virtually every aspect of modern human life. As of June
2012, more than 2.4 billion people—over a third of the world's human
population—have used the services of the Internet; approximately 100 times more
people than were using it in 1995. Internet use grew rapidly in the West from
the mid-1990s to early 2000s and from the late 1990s to present in the
developing world. In 1994 only 3% of American classrooms had access to the Internet
while by 2002 92% did.
Most traditional communications media including telephone,
music, film, and television are being reshaped or redefined by the Internet,
giving birth to new services such as voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and
Internet Protocol television (IPTV). Newspaper, book, and other print
publishing are adapting to website technology, or are reshaped into blogging
and web feeds. The Internet has enabled and 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 Internet has no centralized governance in either
technological implementation or policies for access and usage; each constituent
network sets its own policies. 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.
