INTERNET

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.

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.

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.