The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer
networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite (often called TCP/IP,
although not all applications use TCP) 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, wireless and optical networking
technologies
. The Internet carries an extensive range of information
resources and services, such as the inter-linked hypertext documents of the
World Wide Web (WWW) and the infrastructureto support email.
Most traditional communications media including telephone,
music, film, and television are 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 Web sitetechnology, or are reshaped into blogging and web feeds.
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 research of the
1960s, commissioned by the United States government in collaboration with
private commercial interests to build robust, fault-tolerant, and distributed
computer networks. 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. 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 2011,
more than 2.2 billion people – nearly a third of Earth's population — use the
services of the Internet.[1]
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.
