Information about the Internet
The Internet is a worldwide system of interconnected computer networks that like to use the standard Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP) to serve billions of users world wide. It is a network of networks that is made up of millions of private, public, academic, business, and government networks of local to worldwide scope that are linked by a wide range 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 sites, blogging, and web feeds. The Internet has allowed or accelerated the creation of new modes of human interactions through instant messaging, Internet forums, and social networking sites.
The origins of the Internet reach back to the 1960s when the United States funded research projects of its military agencies to build robust, fault-tolerant and distributed computer networks. This research and a period of civilian funding of a new U.S. backbone by the National Science Foundation spawned world wide participation in the creation of new networking technologies and led directly to the commercialization of an worldwide network in the mid 1990s, and resulted in the following popularization of innumerable applications in virtually all aspects 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.
The term the Internet, when referring to the Internet, has traditionally been treated as a proper noun and written with an initial capital letter. There is a trend to regard it as a generic term or usual noun and thus write it as "the internet", lacking the capital. The word Internet can be shortened to Net. The term cloud is also for the Internet, especially in the contexts of cloud computing and software as a service.
The terms Internet and World Wide Web are usually used in everyday speech without much distinction. , the Internet and the World Wide Web are not one and the same. The Internet is a worldwide data communications system. It is a hardware and software infrastructure that gives connectivity between computers. On the other hand, 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 URLsThe Internet structure and its usage characteristics have been stupassed away comprehensively. It has been determined that both the Internet IP routing structure and hypertext links of the World Wide Web are examples of scale-free of charge networks. Just like the way the commercial Internet providers connect via Internet exchange points, research networks often interconnect into huge subnetworks such as GEANT, GLORIAD, Internet2 (successor of the Abilene Network), and the UK's national research and education network JANET. These in turn are built around smaller networks