Internet
Internet is the
global system of interconnected computer networks that use the Internet
protocol suite (TCP/IP) to link devices worldwide. 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 an extensive range of
information resources and services, such as the inter-linked hypertext
documents and applications of the World Wide Web (WWW), electronic mail,
telephony, and peer-to-peer networks for file sharing.
The origins of the Internet date back to research
commissioned by the United States federal government in the 1960s to build
robust, fault-tolerant communication via computer networks.[1] The primary
precursor network, the ARPANET, initially served as a backbone for interconnection
of regional academic and military networks in the 1980s. The funding of the
National Science Foundation Network as a new backbone in the 1980s, as well as
private funding for other commercial extensions, led to worldwide participation
in the development of new networking technologies, and the merger of many
networks.[2] The linking of commercial networks and enterprises by the early
1990s marks the beginning of the transition to the modern Internet,[3] and
generated a sustained exponential growth as generations of institutional,
personal, and mobile computers were connected to the network. Although the
Internet was widely used by academia since the 1980s, the commercialization
incorporated its services and technologies into virtually every aspect of modern
life.
Internet use grew rapidly in the West from the mid-1990s and
from the late 1990s in the developing world.[4] In the 20 years since 1995,
Internet use has grown 100-times, measured for the period of one year, to over
one third of the world population.[5][6] Most traditional communications media,
including telephony, radio, television, paper mail and newspapers are being
reshaped or redefined by the Internet, giving birth to new services such as
email, Internet telephony, Internet television music, digital newspapers, and
video streaming websites. Newspaper, book, and other print publishing are
adapting to website technology, or are reshaped into blogging, web feeds and
online news aggregators (e.g., Google News). The entertainment industry was
initially the fastest growing segment on the Internet.[citation needed] The
Internet has enabled and accelerated new forms of personal interactions through
instant messaging, Internet forums, and social networking. Online shopping has
grown exponentially both for major retailers and small businesses and
entrepreneurs, as it enables firms to extend their "bricks 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 centralized governance in either
technological implementation or policies for access and usage; each constituent
network sets its own policies.[7] Only the overreaching definitions of the two
principal name spaces in the Internet, the Internet Protocol 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
Terminology
The term Internet, when used to refer to the specific global
system of interconnected Internet Protocol (IP) networks, is a proper noun and
may be written with an initial capital letter. In common use and the media, it
is often not capitalized, viz. the internet. Some guides specify that the word
should be capitalized when used as a noun, but not capitalized when used as an adjective.
The Internet is also often referred to as the Net, as a short form of network.
Historically, as early as 1849, the word internetted was used uncapitalized as
an adjective, meaning interconnected or interwoven. The designers of early
computer networks used internet both as a noun and as a verb in shorthand form
of internetwork or internetworking, meaning interconnecting computer networks.
The terms Internet and World Wide Web are often used
interchangeably in everyday speech; it is common to speak of "going on the
Internet" when invoking 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.
The Web is a collection of interconnected documents (web pages) and other web
resources, linked by hyperlinks and URLs. As another point of comparison,
Hypertext Transfer Protocol, or HTTP, is the language used on the Web for
information transfer, yet it is just one of many languages or protocols that
can be used for communication on the Internet. The term Inter web is a
portmanteau of Internet and World Wide Web typically used sarcastically to
parody a technically unsaved user.
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