The Internet is
the global system of interconnected computer networks that use the Internet
protocol suite (TCP/IP) to link billions of devices worldwide.
It is a network of networks that consists of millions 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 government in the 1960s
to build robust, fault-tolerant communication via computer networks. 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 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 linking of commercial networks and
enterprises by the early 1990s marks the beginning of the transition to the
modern Internet, and generated a sustained exponential growth as
generations of institutional, personal,
and mobile computers were connected to the
network.
Although the Internet
has been 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. 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.
Most traditional
communications media, including telephony and television, are being reshaped or
redefined by the Internet, giving birth to new services such as Internet telephony and Internet television. Newspaper, book, and other
print publishing are adapting to website technology,
or are reshaped into blogging and web feeds.
The entertainment industry was initially the fastest growing segment on the
Internet. 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 artisans and
traders. 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. 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
Acknowledgement by : Wikipedia
