Internet

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This article is about the public worldwide computer network system. For other uses, see Internet (disambiguation).

Visualization of the various routes through a portion of the Internet. From 'The Opte Project'

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 array of information resources and services, most notably the inter-linked hypertext documents of the
World Wide Web (WWW) and the infrastructure to support electronic mail.

Most traditional communications media, such as telephone and television services, are reshaped or redefined using the
technologies of the Internet, giving rise to services such as Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and IPTV. Newspaper publishing
has been reshaped into Web sites, blogging, and web feeds. The Internet has enabled or accelerated the creation of new forms of
human interactions through instant messaging, Internet forums, and social networking sites.

The origins of the Internet reach back to research in the 1960s, both commissioned by the United States government to develop
projects of its military agencies to build robust, fault-tolerant, and distributed computer networks as well as private research. This
research and a period of civilian funding of a new U.S. backbone by the National Science Foundation, as well as private funding
for commercial backbones spawned worldwide participation in the development of new networking technologies and led to the
merger of many networks. The commercialization of an international network in the mid 1990s, and resulted in the following
popularization of countless applications in virtually every aspect of modern human life. As of 2009, an estimated quarter of
Earth's population uses 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.

Terminolog

The terms Internet and World Wide Web are often used in everyday speech without much distinction. However, the Internet and
the World Wide Web are not one and the same. The Internet is a global data communications system. It is a hardware and
software infrastructure that provides connectivity between computers. In contrast, the Web is one of the services communicated
via the Internet. It is a collection of interconnected documents and other resources, linked by hyperlinks and URLs.[1]
The term the Internet, when referring to the entire global system of IP networks, has traditionally been treated as a proper noun
and written with an initial capital letter. In the media and popular culture a trend has developed to regard it as a generic term or
common noun and thus write it as "the internet", without capitalization.

The Internet is also often simply referred to as the net. In many technical illustrations when the precise location or interrelation of
Internet resources is not important, the Internet is often referred as the cloud, and literally depicted as such.

History

Main article: History of the Internet

The USSR's launch of Sputnik spurred the United States to create the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA or DARPA)
in February 1958 to regain a technological lead.[2][3] ARPA created the Information Processing Technology Office (IPTO) to
further the research of the Semi Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) program, which had networked country-wide radar
systems together for the first time. The IPTO's purpose was to find ways to address the US Military's concern about survivability
of their communications networks, and as a first step interconnect their computers at the Pentagon, Cheyenne Mountain, and
SAC HQ. J. C. R. Licklider, a promoter of universal networking, was selected to head the IPTO. Licklider moved from the
Psycho-Acoustic Laboratory at Harvard University to MIT in 1950, after becoming interested in information technology. At
MIT, he served on a committee that established Lincoln Laboratory and worked on the SAGE project. In 1957 he became a Vice
President at BBN, where he bought the first production PDP-1 computer and conducted the first public demonstration of time-
sharing.

Professor Leonard Kleinrock with one of the first ARPANET Interface Message Processors at UCLA

At the IPTO, Licklider's successor Ivan Sutherland in 1965 got Lawrence Roberts to start a project to make a network, and
Roberts based the technology on the work of Paul Baran,[4] who had written an exhaustive study for the United States Air Force
that recommended packet switching (opposed to circuit switching) to achieve better network robustness and disaster
survivability. Roberts had worked at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory originally established to work on the design of the SAGE
system. UCLA professor Leonard Kleinrock had provided the theoretical foundations for packet networks in 1962, and later, in
the 1970s, for hierarchical routing, concepts which have been the underpinning of the development towards today's Internet.

Sutherland's successor Robert Taylor convinced Roberts to build on his early packet switching successes and come and be the
IPTO Chief Scientist. Once there, Roberts prepared a report called Resource Sharing Computer Networks which was approved
by Taylor in June 1968 and laid the foundation for the launch of the working ARPANET the following year.

After much work, the first two nodes of what would become the ARPANET were interconnected between Kleinrock's Network
Measurement Center at the UCLA's School of Engineering and Applied Science and Douglas Engelbart's NLS system at SRI
International (SRI) in Menlo Park, California, on 29 October 1969. The third site on the ARPANET was the Culler-Fried
Interactive Mathematics centre at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the fourth was the University of Utah
Graphics Department. In an early sign of future growth, there were already fifteen sites connected to the young ARPANET by the
end of 1971.
The ARPANET was one of the eve networks of today's Internet. In an independent development, Donald Davies at the UK
National Physical Laboratory also discovered the concept of packet switching in the early 1960s, first giving a talk on the subject
in 1965, after which the teams in the new field from two sides of the Atlantic ocean first became acquainted. It was actually
Davies' coinage of the wording "packet" and "packet switching" that was adopted as the standard terminology. Davies also built a
packet switched network in the UK called the Mark I in 1970. [5] Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN), the private contractors for
ARPANET, set out to create a separate commercial version after establishing "value added carriers" was legalized in the U.S. [6].
The network they established was called Telenet and began operation in 1975, installing free public dial-up access in cities
throughout the U.S. Telenet was the first packet-switching network open to the general public. [7]

Following the demonstration that packet switching worked on the ARPANET, the British Post Office, Telenet, DATAPAC and
TRANSPAC collaborated to create the first international packet-switched network service. In the UK, this was referred to as the
International Packet Switched Service (IPSS), in 1978. The collection of X.25-based networks grew from Europe and the US to
cover Canada, Hong Kong and Australia by 1981. The X.25 packet switching standard was developed in the CCITT (now called
ITU-T) around 1976.

A plaque commemorating the birth of the Internet at Stanford University

X.25 was independent of the TCP/IP protocols that arose from the experimental work of DARPA on the ARPANET, Packet
Radio Net and Packet Satellite Net during the same time period.

The early ARPANET ran on the Network Control Program (NCP), implementing the host-to-host connectivity and switching
layers of the protocol stack, designed and first implemented in December 1970 by a team called the Network Working Group
(NWG) led by Steve Crocker. To respond to the network's rapid growth as more and more locations connected, Vinton Cerf and
Robert Kahn developed the first description of the now widely used TCP protocols during 1973 and published a paper on the
subject in May 1974. Use of the term "Internet" to describe a single global TCP/IP network originated in December 1974 with the
publication of RFC 675, the first full specification of TCP that was written by Vinton Cerf, Yogen Dalal and Carl Sunshine, then
at Stanford University. During the next nine years, work proceeded to refine the protocols and to implement them on a wide
range of operating systems. The first TCP/IP-based wide-area network was operational by 1 January 1983 when all hosts on the
ARPANET were switched over from the older NCP protocols. In 1985, the United States' National Science Foundation (NSF)
commissioned the construction of the NSFNET, a university 56 kilobit/second network backbone using computers called
"fuzzballs" by their inventor, David L. Mills. The following year, NSF sponsored the conversion to a higher-speed
1.5 megabit/second network. A key decision to use the DARPA TCP/IP protocols was made by Dennis Jennings, then in charge
of the Supercomputer program at NSF.

The opening of the NSFNET to other networks began in 1988.[citation needed] The US Federal Networking Council approved the
interconnection of the NSFNET to the commercial MCI Mail system in that year and the link was made in the summer of 1989.
Other commercial electronic mail services were soon connected, including OnTyme, Telemail and Compuserve. In that same
year, three commercial Internet service providers (ISPs) began operations: UUNET, PSINet, and CERFNET. Important, separate
networks that offered gateways into, then later merged with, the Internet include Usenet and BITNET. Various other commercial
and educational networks, such as Telenet (by that time renamed to Sprintnet), Tymnet, Compuserve and JANET were
interconnected with the growing Internet in the 1980s as the TCP/IP protocol became increasingly popular. The adaptability of
TCP/IP to existing communication networks allowed for rapid growth. The open availability of the specifications and reference
code permitted commercial vendors to build interoperable network components, such as routers, making standardized network
gear available from many companies. This aided in the rapid growth of the Internet and the proliferation of local-area
networking. It seeded the widespread implementation and rigorous standardization of TCP/IP on UNIX and virtually every other
common operating system.

This NeXT Computer was used by Sir Tim Berners-Lee at CERN and became the world's first Web server.

Although the basic applications and guidelines that make the Internet possible had existed for almost two decades, the network
did not gain a public face until the 1990s. On 6 August 1991, CERN, a pan European organization for particle research,
publicized the new World Wide Web project. The Web was invented by British scientist Tim Berners-Lee in 1989. An early
popular web browser was ViolaWWW, patterned after HyperCard and built using the X Window System. It was eventually
replaced in popularity by the Mosaic web browser. In 1993, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the
University of Illinois released version 1.0 of Mosaic, and by late 1994 there was growing public interest in the previously
academic, technical Internet. By 1996 usage of the word Internet had become commonplace, and consequently, so had its use as a
synecdoche in reference to the World Wide Web.

Meanwhile, over the course of the decade, the Internet successfully accommodated the majority of previously existing public
computer networks (although some networks, such as FidoNet, have remained separate). During the 1990s, it was estimated that
the Internet grew by 100 percent per year, with a brief period of explosive growth in 1996 and 1997. [8] This growth is often
attributed to the lack of central administration, which allows organic growth of the network, as well as the non-proprietary open
nature of the Internet protocols, which encourages vendor interoperability and prevents any one company from exerting too much
control over the network.[9] The estimated population of Internet users is 1.97 billion as of 30 June 2010.[10]

Services

Information

Many people use the terms Internet and World Wide Web, or just the Web, interchangeably, but the two terms are not
synonymous. The World Wide Web is a global set of documents, images and other resources, logically interrelated by hyperlinks
and referenced with Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs). URIs allow providers to symbolically identify services and clients to
locate and address web servers, file servers, and other databases that store documents and provide resources and access them
using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), the primary carrier protocol of the Web. HTTP is only one of the hundreds of
communication protocols used on the Internet. Web services may also use HTTP to allow software systems to communicate in
order to share and exchange business logic and data.

World Wide Web browser software, such as Microsoft's Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Apple's Safari, and Google
Chrome, let users navigate from one web page to another via hyperlinks embedded in the documents. These documents may also
contain any combination of computer data, including graphics, sounds, text, video, multimedia and interactive content including
games, office applications and scientific demonstrations. Through keyword-driven Internet research using search engines like
Yahoo! and Google, users worldwide have easy, instant access to a vast and diverse amount of online information. Compared to
printed encyclopedias and traditional libraries, the World Wide Web has enabled the decentralization of information.

The Web has also enabled individuals and organizations to publish ideas and information to a potentially large audience online at
greatly reduced expense and time delay. Publishing a web page, a blog, or building a website involves little initial cost and many
cost-free services are available. Publishing and maintaining large, professional web sites with attractive, diverse and up-to-date
information is still a difficult and expensive proposition, however. Many individuals and some companies and groups use web
logs or blogs, which are largely used as easily updatable online diaries. Some commercial organizations encourage staff to
communicate advice in their areas of specialization in the hope that visitors will be impressed by the expert knowledge and free
information, and be attracted to the corporation as a result. One example of this practice is Microsoft, whose product developers
publish their personal blogs in order to pique the public's interest in their work. Collections of personal web pages published by
large service providers remain popular, and have become increasingly sophisticated. Whereas operations such as Angelfire and
GeoCities have existed since the early days of the Web, newer offerings from, for example, Facebook and MySpace currently
have large followings. These operations often brand themselves as social network services rather than simply as web page hosts.

Advertising on popular web pages can be lucrative, and e-commerce or the sale of products and services directly via the Web
continues to grow. In the early days, web pages were usually created as sets of complete and isolated HTML text files stored on a
web server. More recently, websites are more often created using content management or wiki software with, initially, very little
content. Contributors to these systems, who may be paid staff, members of a club or other organization or members of the public,
fill underlying databases with content using editing pages designed for that purpose, while casual visitors view and read this
content in its final HTML form. There may or may not be editorial, approval and security systems built into the process of taking
newly entered content and making it available to the target visitors.

Communication

E-mail is an important communications service available on the Internet. The concept of sending electronic text messages
between parties in a way analogous to mailing letters or memos predates the creation of the Internet. Today it can be important to
distinguish between internet and internal e-mail systems. Internet e-mail may travel and be stored unencrypted on many other
networks and machines out of both the sender's and the recipient's control. During this time it is quite possible for the content to
be read and even tampered with by third parties, if anyone considers it important enough. Purely internal or intranet mail systems,
where the information never leaves the corporate or organization's network, are much more secure, although in any organization
there will be IT and other personnel whose job may involve monitoring, and occasionally accessing, the e-mail of other
employees not addressed to them. Pictures, documents and other files can be sent as e-mail attachments. E-mails can be cc-ed to
multiple e-mail addresses.

Internet telephony is another common communications service made possible by the creation of the Internet. VoIP stands for
Voice-over-Internet Protocol, referring to the protocol that underlies all Internet communication. The idea began in the early
1990s with walkie-talkie-like voice applications for personal computers. In recent years many VoIP systems have become as easy
to use and as convenient as a normal telephone. The benefit is that, as the Internet carries the voice traffic, VoIP can be free or
cost much less than a traditional telephone call, especially over long distances and especially for those with always-on Internet
connections such as cable or ADSL. VoIP is maturing into a competitive alternative to traditional telephone service.
Interoperability between different providers has improved and the ability to call or receive a call from a traditional telephone is
available. Simple, inexpensive VoIP network adapters are available that eliminate the need for a personal computer.

Voice quality can still vary from call to call but is often equal to and can even exceed that of traditional calls. Remaining
problems for VoIP include emergency telephone number dialling and reliability. Currently, a few VoIP providers provide an
emergency service, but it is not universally available. Traditional phones are line-powered and operate during a power failure;
VoIP does not do so without a backup power source for the phone equipment and the Internet access devices. VoIP has also
become increasingly popular for gaming applications, as a form of communication between players. Popular VoIP clients for
gaming include Ventrilo and Teamspeak. Wii, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360 also offer VoIP chat features.

Data transfer

File sharing is an example of transferring large amounts of data across the Internet. A computer file can be e-mailed to customers,
colleagues and friends as an attachment. It can be uploaded to a website or FTP server for easy download by others. It can be put
into a "shared location" or onto a file server for instant use by colleagues. The load of bulk downloads to many users can be eased
by the use of "mirror" servers or peer-to-peer networks. In any of these cases, access to the file may be controlled by user
authentication, the transit of the file over the Internet may be obscured by encryption, and money may change hands for access to
the file. The price can be paid by the remote charging of funds from, for example, a credit card whose details are also passed—
usually fully encrypted—across the Internet. The origin and authenticity of the file received may be checked by digital signatures
or by MD5 or other message digests. These simple features of the Internet, over a worldwide basis, are changing the production,
sale, and distribution of anything that can be reduced to a computer file for transmission. This includes all manner of print
publications, software products, news, music, film, video, photography, graphics and the other arts. This in turn has caused
seismic shifts in each of the existing industries that previously controlled the production and distribution of these products.

Streaming media refers to the act that many existing radio and television broadcasters promote Internet "feeds" of their live audio
and video streams (for example, the BBC). They may also allow time-shift viewing or listening such as Preview, Classic Clips
and Listen Again features. These providers have been joined by a range of pure Internet "broadcasters" who never had on-air
licenses. This means that an Internet-connected device, such as a computer or something more specific, can be used to access on-
line media in much the same way as was previously possible only with a television or radio receiver. The range of available types
of content is much wider, from specialized technical webcasts to on-demand popular multimedia services. Podcasting is a
variation on this theme, where—usually audio—material is downloaded and played back on a computer or shifted to a portable
media player to be listened to on the move. These techniques using simple equipment allow anybody, with little censorship or
licensing control, to broadcast audio-visual material worldwide.

Webcams can be seen as an even lower-budget extension of this phenomenon. While some webcams can give full-frame-rate
video, the picture is usually either small or updates slowly. Internet users can watch animals around an African waterhole, ships
in the Panama Canal, traffic at a local roundabout or monitor their own premises, live and in real time. Video chat rooms and
video conferencing are also popular with many uses being found for personal webcams, with and without two-way sound.
YouTube was founded on 15 February 2005 and is now the leading website for free streaming video with a vast number of users.
It uses a flash-based web player to stream and show video files. Registered users may upload an unlimited amount of video and
build their own personal profile. YouTube claims that its users watch hundreds of millions, and upload hundreds of thousands of
videos daily.[17]

Access

Graph of Internet users per 100 inhabitants between 1997 and 2007 by International Telecommunication Union

The prevalent language for communication on the Internet is English. This may be a result of the origin of the Internet, as well as
English's role as a lingua franca. It may also be related to the poor capability of early computers, largely originating in the United
States, to handle characters other than those in the English variant of the Latin alphabet. After English (28% of Web visitors) the
most requested languages on the World Wide Web are Chinese (23%), Spanish (8%), Japanese (5%), Portuguese and German
(4% each), Arabic, French and Russian (3% each), and Korean (2%). [18] By region, 42% of the world's Internet users are based in
Asia, 24% in Europe, 14% in North America, 10% in Latin America and the Caribbean taken together, 5% in Africa, 3% in the
Middle East and 1% in Australia/Oceania.[19] The Internet's technologies have developed enough in recent years, especially in the
use of Unicode, that good facilities are available for development and communication in the world's widely used languages.
However, some glitches such as mojibake (incorrect display of some languages' characters) still remain.

Common methods of Internet access in homes include dial-up, landline broadband (over coaxial cable, fibre optic or copper
wires), Wi-Fi, satellite and 3G technology cell phones. Public places to use the Internet include libraries and Internet cafes, where
computers with Internet connections are available. There are also Internet access points in many public places such as airport
halls and coffee shops, in some cases just for brief use while standing. Various terms are used, such as "public Internet kiosk",
"public access terminal", and "Web payphone". Many hotels now also have public terminals, though these are usually fee-based.
These terminals are widely accessed for various usage like ticket booking, bank deposit, online payment etc. Wi-Fi provides
wireless access to computer networks, and therefore can do so to the Internet itself. Hotspots providing such access include Wi-Fi
cafes, where would-be users need to bring their own wireless-enabled devices such as a laptop or PDA. These services may be
free to all, free to customers only, or fee-based. A hotspot need not be limited to a confined location. A whole campus or park, or
even an entire city can be enabled. Grassroots efforts have led to wireless community networks. Commercial Wi-Fi services
covering large city areas are in place in London, Vienna, Toronto, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Chicago and Pittsburgh. The
Internet can then be accessed from such places as a park bench. [20] Apart from Wi-Fi, there have been experiments with
proprietary mobile wireless networks like Ricochet, various high-speed data services over cellular phone networks, and fixed
wireless services. High-end mobile phones such as smartphones generally come with Internet access through the phone network.
Web browsers such as Opera are available on these advanced handsets, which can also run a wide variety of other Internet
software. More mobile phones have Internet access than PCs, though this is not as widely used. [citation needed] An Internet access
provider and protocol matrix differentiates the methods used to get online.

Social impact

Main article: Sociology of the Internet

The Internet has enabled entirely new forms of social interaction, activities, and organizing, thanks to its basic features such as
widespread usability and access. Social networking websites such as Facebook, Twitter and MySpace have created new ways to
socialize and interact. Users of these sites are able to add a wide variety of information to pages, to pursue common interests, and
to connect with others. It is also possible to find existing acquaintances, to allow communication among existing groups of
people. Sites like LinkedIn foster commercial and business connections. YouTube and Flickr specialize in users' videos and
photographs.

In the first decade of the 21st century the first generation is raised with widespread availability of Internet connectivity, bringing
consequences and concerns in areas such as personal privacy and identity, and distribution of copyrighted materials. These
"digital natives" face a variety of challenges that were not present for prior generations.

The Internet has achieved new relevance as a political tool, leading to Internet censorship by some states. The presidential
campaign of Howard Dean in 2004 in the United States was notable for its success in soliciting donation via the Internet. Many
political groups use the Internet to achieve a new method of organizing in order to carry out their mission, having given rise to
Internet activism. Some governments, such as those of Iran, North Korea, Myanmar, the People's Republic of China, and Saudi
Arabia, restrict what people in their countries can access on the Internet, especially political and religious content. [citation needed] This
is accomplished through software that filters domains and content so that they may not be easily accessed or obtained without
elaborate circumvention.[original research?]

In Norway, Denmark, Finland[21] and Sweden, major Internet service providers have voluntarily, possibly to avoid such an
arrangement being turned into law, agreed to restrict access to sites listed by authorities. While this list of forbidden URLs is only
supposed to contain addresses of known child pornography sites, the content of the list is secret. [citation needed] Many countries,
including the United States, have enacted laws against the possession or distribution of certain material, such as child
pornography, via the Internet, but do not mandate filtering software. There are many free and commercially available software
programs, called content-control software, with which a user can choose to block offensive websites on individual computers or
networks, in order to limit a child's access to pornographic materials or depiction of violence.

The Internet has been a major outlet for leisure activity since its inception, with entertaining social experiments such as MUDs
and MOOs being conducted on university servers, and humor-related Usenet groups receiving much traffic. Today, many Internet
forums have sections devoted to games and funny videos; short cartoons in the form of Flash movies are also popular. Over
6 million people use blogs or message boards as a means of communication and for the sharing of ideas. The pornography and
gambling industries have taken advantage of the World Wide Web, and often provide a significant source of advertising revenue
for other websites.[citation needed] Although many governments have attempted to restrict both industries' use of the Internet, this has
generally failed to stop their widespread popularity. [citation needed]

One main area of leisure activity on the Internet is multiplayer gaming. This form of recreation creates communities, where
people of all ages and origins enjoy the fast-paced world of multiplayer games. These range from MMORPG to first-person
shooters, from role-playing games to online gambling. This has revolutionized the way many people interact [citation needed] while
spending their free time on the Internet. While online gaming has been around since the 1970s, [citation needed] modern modes of online
gaming began with subscription services such as GameSpy and MPlayer. Non-subscribers were limited to certain types of game
play or certain games. Many people use the Internet to access and download music, movies and other works for their enjoyment
and relaxation. Free and fee-based services exist for all of these activities, using centralized servers and distributed peer-to-peer
technologies. Some of these sources exercise more care with respect to the original artists' copyrights than others.

Many people use the World Wide Web to access news, weather and sports reports, to plan and book vacations and to find out
more about their interests. People use chat, messaging and e-mail to make and stay in touch with friends worldwide, sometimes
in the same way as some previously had pen pals. The Internet has seen a growing number of Web desktops, where users can
access their files and settings via the Internet.

Cyberslacking can become a drain on corporate resources; the average UK employee spent 57 minutes a day surfing the Web
while at work, according to a 2003 study by Peninsula Business Services. [22] Internet addiction disorder is excessive computer use
that interferes with daily life. Some psychologists believe that Internet use has other effects on individuals for instance interfering
with the deep thinking that leads to true creativity. [citation needed]