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The Internet (or internet) is the Global network of interconnected that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a internetworking that comprises Private network, public, academic, business, and government networks of local to global scope, linked by electronic, Wireless network, and optical networking technologies. The Internet carries a vast range of information services and resources, such as the interlinked hypertext documents and Web application of the World Wide Web (WWW), email, internet telephony, streaming media and file sharing.
Most Old media, including telephone, radio, television, Mail, Newspaper, and Printing press, have been transformed by the Internet, giving rise to new media such as email, online music, digital newspapers, , and Audio stream and video streaming websites. The Internet has enabled and accelerated new forms of personal interaction through instant messaging, , and social networking services. Online shopping has also grown to occupy a significant market across industries, enabling firms to extend brick and mortar presences to serve larger markets. Business-to-business and financial services on the Internet affect across entire industries.
The Internet has no single centralized governance in either technological implementation or policies for access and usage. Each constituent network sets its own policies. The overarching definitions of the two principal on the Internet, the IP address (IP 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 non-profit Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).
In common use most publications treated the word Internet as a capitalized proper noun; this has become less common. This reflects the tendency in English to capitalize new terms and move them to lowercase as they become familiar. The word is sometimes still capitalized to distinguish the global internet from smaller networks, though many publications, including the AP Stylebook since 2016, recommend the lowercase form in every case. In 2016, the Oxford English Dictionary found that, based on a study of around 2.5 billion printed and online sources, "Internet" was capitalized in 54% of cases.
The terms Internet and World Wide Web are often used interchangeably; it is common to speak of "going on the Internet" when using a web browser to view . However, the World Wide Web, or the Web, is only one of a large number of Internet services, a collection of documents (web pages) and other linked by and URLs.
In the 1960s, computer scientists began developing systems for time-sharing of computer resources.F. J. Corbató, et al., The Compatible Time-Sharing System A Programmer's Guide (MIT Press, 1963) . "To establish the context of the present work, it is informative to trace the development of time-sharing at MIT. Shortly after the first paper on time-shared computers by C. Strachey at the June 1959 UNESCO Information Processing conference, H.M. Teager and J. McCarthy delivered an unpublished paper "Time-Shared Program Testing" at the August 1959 ACM Meeting." J. C. R. Licklider proposed the idea of a universal network while working at Bolt Beranek & Newman and, later, leading the Information Processing Techniques Office at the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the United States Department of Defense. Research into packet switching, one of the fundamental Internet technologies, started in the work of Paul Baran at RAND in the early 1960s and, independently, Donald Davies at the United Kingdom's National Physical Laboratory in 1965.;
After the Symposium on Operating Systems Principles in 1967, packet switching from the proposed NPL network and routing concepts proposed by Baran were incorporated into the design of the ARPANET, an experimental resource sharing network proposed by ARPA.
ARPANET development began with two network nodes which were interconnected between the University of California, Los Angeles and the Stanford Research Institute on 29 October 1969. The third site was at the University of California, Santa Barbara, followed by the University of Utah. By the end of 1971, 15 sites were connected to the young ARPANET. Thereafter, the ARPANET gradually developed into a decentralized communications network, connecting remote centers and military bases in the United States. Other user networks and research networks, such as the Merit Network and CYCLADES, were developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Early international collaborations for the ARPANET were rare. Connections were made in 1973 to Norway (NORSAR and NDRE) and to Peter Kirstein's research group at University College London, which provided a gateway to British academic networks, the first Internetworking for resource sharing.
ARPA projects, the International Network Working Group and commercial initiatives led to the development of various protocols and standards by which multiple separate networks could become a single network, or a Internetworking. In 1974, Vint Cerf at Stanford University and Bob Kahn at DARPA published a proposal for "A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication". Cerf and his students used the term internet as a shorthand for internetwork in . The Internet Experiment Notes and later RFCs repeated this use. The work of Louis Pouzin and others had important influences on the resulting TCP/IP design. National PTTs and commercial providers developed the X.25 standard and deployed it on public data networks.
In 1982, the Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP) was standardized, which facilitated worldwide proliferation of interconnected networks. TCP/IP network access expanded again in 1986 when the National Science Foundation Network (NSFNet) provided access to supercomputer sites in the United States for researchers, first at speeds of 56 kbit/s and later at 1.5 Mbit/s and 45 Mbit/s.
The NSFNet expanded into academic and research organizations in Europe, Australia, New Zealand and Japan in 1988–89.RIPE (RIPE) Although other network protocols such as UUCP and PTT public data networks had global reach well before this time, this marked the beginning of the Internet as an intercontinental network. Commercial Internet service providers emerged in 1989 in the United States and Australia. The ARPANET was decommissioned in 1990.
Just months later, on 1 January 1990, PSInet launched an alternate Internet backbone for commercial use; one of the networks that added to the core of the commercial Internet of later years. In March 1990, the first high-speed T1 (1.5 Mbit/s) link between the NSFNET and Europe was installed between Cornell University and CERN, allowing much more robust communications than were capable with satellites.
Later in 1990, Tim Berners-Lee began writing WorldWideWeb, the first web browser, after two years of lobbying CERN management. By Christmas 1990, Berners-Lee had built all the tools necessary for a working Web: the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) 0.9, the HyperText Markup Language (HTML), the first Web browser (which was also an HTML editor and could access Usenet newsgroups and FTP files), the first HTTP server software (later known as CERN httpd), the first web server, and the first Web pages that described the project itself.
In 1991 the Commercial Internet eXchange was founded, allowing PSInet to communicate with the other commercial networks CERFnet and Alternet. Stanford Federal Credit Union was the first financial institution to offer online Internet banking services to all of its members in October 1994. In 1996, OP Financial Group, also a cooperative bank, became the second online bank in the world and the first in Europe. By 1995, the Internet was fully commercialized in the U.S. when the NSFNet was decommissioned, removing the last restrictions on use of the Internet to carry commercial traffic.
As technology advanced and commercial opportunities fueled reciprocal growth, the volume of Internet traffic started experiencing similar characteristics as that of the scaling of , exemplified by Moore's law, doubling every 18 months. This growth, formalized as Edholm's law, was catalyzed by advances in MOS technology, laser light wave systems, and noise performance. (2025). 9781424438310 ISBN 9781424438310
During the late 1990s, it was estimated that traffic on the public Internet grew by 100 percent per year, while the mean annual growth in the number of Internet users was thought to be between 20% and 50%. This growth is often attributed to the lack of central administration, which allows organic growth of the network, as well as the non-proprietary nature of the Internet protocols, which encourages vendor interoperability and prevents any one company from exerting too much control over the network.
In November 2006, the Internet was included on USA Todays list of the New Seven Wonders. , the estimated total number of Internet users was 2.095 billion (30% of world population). It is estimated that in 1993 the Internet carried only 1% of the information flowing through two-way telecommunication. By 2000 this figure had grown to 51%, and by 2007 more than 97% of all telecommunicated information was carried over the Internet. Modern can access the Internet through cellular carrier networks, and internet usage by mobile and tablet devices exceeded desktop worldwide for the first time in October 2016. , 80% of the world's population were covered by a 4G network.
The limits that users face on accessing information via mobile applications coincide with a broader process of fragmentation of the Internet. Fragmentation restricts access to media content and tends to affect the poorest users the most. One solution, zero-rating, is the practice of Internet service providers allowing users free connectivity to access specific content or applications without cost.
However, in terms of penetration, in 2022, China had a 70% penetration rate compared to India's 60% and the United States's 90%. In 2022, 54% of the world's Internet users were based in Asia, 14% in Europe, 7% in North America, 10% in Latin America and the Caribbean, 11% in Africa, 4% in the Middle East and 1% in Oceania. In 2019, Kuwait, Qatar, the Falkland Islands, Bermuda and Iceland had the highest Internet penetration by the number of users, with 93% or more of the population with access. "Percentage of Individuals using the Internet 2000–2012" , International Telecommunication Union (Geneva), June 2013. Retrieved 22 June 2013. As of 2022, it was estimated that 5.4 billion people use the Internet, more than two-thirds of the world's population.
Early computer systems were limited to the characters in the ASCII (ASCII), a subset of the Latin alphabet. After English (27%), the most requested languages on the World Wide Web are Chinese (25%), Spanish (8%), Japanese (5%), Portuguese and German (4% each), Arabic, French and Russian (3% each), and Korean (2%). Modern character encoding standards, such as Unicode, allow for development and communication in the world's widely used languages. However, some glitches such as mojibake (incorrect display of some languages' characters) still remain.
Several neologisms exist that refer to Internet users: Netizen (as in "citizen of the net") refers to those actively involved in improving online communities, the Internet in general or surrounding political affairs and rights such as free speech," netizen", Dictionary.com. . Internaut refers to operators or technically highly capable users of the Internet, digital citizen refers to a person using the Internet in order to engage in society, politics, and government participation. (2025). 9780819456069, SPIE Press. ISBN 9780819456069
have also been used in the academic community for sharing and dissemination of information across institutional and international boundaries. In those settings, they have been found useful for collaboration on grant writing, strategic planning, departmental documentation, and committee work. The United States Patent and Trademark Office uses a wiki to allow the public to collaborate on finding prior art relevant to examination of pending patent applications. Queens, New York has used a wiki to allow citizens to collaborate on the design and planning of a local park. The English Wikipedia has the largest user base among wikis on the World Wide Web and ranks in the top 10 among all sites in terms of traffic.
Another area of leisure activity on the Internet is multiplayer gaming. This form of recreation creates communities, where people of all ages and origins enjoy the fast-paced world of multiplayer games. These range from MMORPG to first-person shooters, from role-playing video games to online gambling. While online gaming has been around since the 1970s, modern modes of online gaming began with subscription services such as GameSpy Arcade and MPlayer.
Streaming media is the real-time delivery of digital media for immediate consumption or enjoyment by end users. Streaming companies (such as Netflix, Disney+, Amazon's Prime Video, Mubi, Hulu, and Apple TV+) now dominate the entertainment industry, eclipsing traditional broadcasters. Audio streamers such as Spotify and Apple Music also have significant market share in the audio entertainment market.
Video sharing websites are also a major factor in the entertainment ecosystem. YouTube was founded on 15 February 2005 and is now the leading website for free streaming video with more than two billion users. It uses a web player to stream and show video files. YouTube users watch hundreds of millions, and upload hundreds of thousands, of videos daily. Other video sharing websites include Vimeo, Instagram and TikTok.
A number of advertising-funded ostensible video sharing websites known as "" have been created to host shared pornographic video content. Due to laws requiring the documentation of the origin of pornography, these websites now largely operate in conjunction with pornographic movie studios and their own independent creator networks, acting as de-facto video streaming services. Major players in this field include the market leader Aylo, the operator of PornHub and numerous other branded sites, as well as other independent operators such as xHamster and Xvideos. , Internet traffic to pornographic video sites rivalled that of mainstream video streaming and sharing services.
The internet also allows for cloud computing, virtual private networks, remote desktops, and remote work.
Children also face dangers online such as cyberbullying and Child grooming, who sometimes pose as children themselves. Due to naivety, they may also post personal information about themselves online, which could put them or their families at risk unless warned not to do so. Many parents choose to enable Internet filtering or supervise their children's online activities in an attempt to protect their children from pornography or violent content on the Internet. The most popular social networking services commonly forbid users under the age of 13. However, these policies can be circumvented by registering an account with a false birth date, and a significant number of children aged under 13 join such sites. Social networking services for younger children, which claim to provide better levels of protection for children, also exist.
Internet usage has been correlated to users' loneliness. Lonely people tend to use the Internet as an outlet for their feelings and to share their stories with others, such as in the "I am lonely will anyone speak to me" thread.
Cyberslacking can become a drain on corporate resources; employees spend a significant amount of time surfing the Web while at work. Internet addiction disorder is excessive computer use that interferes with daily life. Nicholas G. Carr believes that Internet use has other effects on individuals, for instance improving skills of scan-reading and interfering with the deep thinking that leads to true creativity.
While much has been written of the economic advantages of Internet-enabled commerce, there is also evidence that some aspects of the Internet such as maps and location-aware services may serve to reinforce economic inequality and the digital divide. Electronic commerce may be responsible for consolidation and the decline of mom-and-pop, brick and mortar businesses resulting in increases in income inequality.
A 2013 Institute for Local Self-Reliance report states that brick-and-mortar retailers employ 47 people for every $10 million in sales, while Amazon employs only 14. Similarly, the 700-employee room rental start-up Airbnb was valued at $10 billion in 2014, about half as much as Hilton Worldwide, which employs 152,000 people. At that time, Uber employed 1,000 full-time employees and was valued at $18.2 billion, about the same valuation as Avis Rent a Car and The Hertz Corporation combined, which together employed almost 60,000 people.
Advertising on popular web pages can be lucrative, and e-commerce. Online advertising is a form of marketing and advertising which uses the Internet to deliver promotional marketing messages to consumers. It includes email marketing, search engine marketing (SEM), social media marketing, many types of display advertising (including web banner advertising), and mobile advertising. In 2011, Internet advertising revenues in the United States surpassed those of cable television and nearly exceeded those of broadcast television. Many common online advertising practices are controversial and increasingly subject to regulation.
Many have understood the Internet as an extension of the Habermasian notion of the public sphere, observing how network communication technologies provide something like a global civic forum. However, incidents of politically motivated Internet censorship have now been recorded in many countries, including western democracies.
E-government is the use of technological communications devices, such as the Internet, to provide to citizens and other persons in a country or region. E-government offers opportunities for more direct and convenient citizen access to government and for government provision of services directly to citizens.
highly dispersed small groups of practitioners that may remain largely anonymous within the larger social context and operate in relative secrecy, while still linked remotely to a larger network of believers who share a set of practices and texts, and often a common devotion to a particular leader. Overseas supporters provide funding and support; domestic practitioners distribute tracts, participate in acts of resistance, and share information on the internal situation with outsiders. Collectively, members and practitioners of such sects construct viable virtual communities of faith, exchanging personal testimonies and engaging in the collective study via email, online chat rooms, and web-based message boards.In particular, the British government has raised concerns about the prospect of young British Muslims being indoctrinated into Islamic extremism by material on the Internet, being persuaded to join terrorist groups such as the so-called "Islamic State", and then potentially committing acts of terrorism on returning to Britain after fighting in Syria or Iraq.
HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is the main access protocol of the World Wide Web. also use HTTP for communication between software systems for information transfer, sharing and exchanging business data and logistics and is one of many languages or protocols that can be used for communication on the Internet.
World Wide Web browser software, such as Microsoft's Internet Explorer/Edge, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Apple's Safari, and Google Chrome, enable users to navigate from one web page to another via the hyperlinks embedded in the documents. These documents may also contain computer data, including graphics, sounds, Plain text, web video, multimedia and interactive content. Client-side scripts can include animations, web game, office applications and scientific demonstrations.
Internet telephony is a common communications service realized with the Internet. The name of the principal internetworking protocol, the Internet Protocol, lends its name to voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). VoIP systems now dominate many markets, being as easy and convenient as a traditional telephone, while having substantial cost savings, especially over long distances.
In any of these cases, access to the file may be controlled by user authentication, the transit of the file over the Internet may be obscured by encryption, and money may change hands for access to the file. The price can be paid by the remote charging of funds from, for example, a credit card whose details are also passed—usually fully encrypted—across the Internet. The origin and authenticity of the file received may be checked by digital signatures or by MD5 or other message digests.
While the hardware components in the Internet infrastructure can often be used to support other software systems, it is the design and the standardization process of the software that characterizes the Internet and provides the foundation for its scalability and success. The responsibility for the architectural design of the Internet software systems has been assumed by the IETF.
The IETF conducts standard-setting work groups, open to any individual, about the various aspects of Internet architecture. The resulting contributions and standards are published as Request for Comments (RFC) documents on the IETF web site. The principal methods of networking that enable the Internet are contained in specially designated RFCs that constitute the Internet Standards. Other less rigorous documents are simply informative, experimental, or historical, or document the best current practices when implementing Internet technologies.
The National Telecommunications and Information Administration, an agency of the United States Department of Commerce, had final approval over changes to the DNS root zone until the IANA stewardship transition on 1 October 2016.
On 16 November 2005, the United Nations-sponsored World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis established the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) to discuss Internet-related issues.
An ISP may use a single upstream provider for connectivity, or implement multihoming to achieve redundancy and load balancing. Internet exchange points are major traffic exchanges with physical connections to multiple ISPs. Large organizations, such as academic institutions, large enterprises, and governments, may perform the same function as ISPs, engaging in peering and purchasing transit on behalf of their internal networks. Research networks tend to interconnect with large subnetworks such as GEANT, GLORIAD, Internet2, and the UK's national research and education network, JANET.
Colocation centers often host private peering connections between their customers, internet transit providers, cloud providers, for connecting customers together, Internet exchange points, and landing points and terminal equipment for fiber optic submarine communication cables, connecting the internet.
Domain Name Systems convert user-inputted domain names (e.g. "en.wikipedia.org") into IP addresses.
By design, IPv6 is not directly interoperable with IPv4. Instead, it establishes a parallel version of the Internet not directly accessible with IPv4 software. Thus, translation facilities exist for internetworking, and some nodes have duplicate networking software for both networks. Essentially all modern computer Operating system support both versions of the Internet Protocol. Network infrastructure, however, has been lagging in this development.
The routing prefix may be expressed in Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) notation written as the first address of a network, followed by a slash character ( /), and ending with the bit-length of the prefix. For example, is the prefix of the Internet Protocol version 4 network starting at the given address, having 24 bits allocated for the network prefix, and the remaining 8 bits reserved for host addressing. Addresses in the range to belong to this network. The IPv6 address specification is a large address block with 296 addresses, having a 32-bit routing prefix.
For IPv4, a network may also be characterized by its subnet mask or netmask, which is the bitmask that when applied by a bitwise AND operation to any IP address in the network, yields the routing prefix. Subnet masks are also expressed in dot-decimal notation like an address. For example, is the subnet mask for the prefix .
The default gateway is the node that serves as the forwarding host (router) to other networks when no other route specification matches the destination IP address of a packet.
Malware poses serious problems to individuals and businesses on the Internet. According to NortonLifeLock's 2018 Internet Security Threat Report (ISTR), malware variants number has increased to 669,947,865 in 2017, which is twice as many malware variants as in 2016. Cybercrime, which includes malware attacks as well as other crimes committed by computer, was predicted to cost the world economy US$6 trillion in 2021, and is increasing at a rate of 15% per year. Since 2021, malware has been designed to target computer systems that run critical infrastructure such as the electricity distribution network. Malware can be designed to evade antivirus software detection algorithms.
The large amount of data gathered from packet capture requires surveillance software that filters and reports relevant information, such as the use of certain words or phrases, the access to certain types of web sites, or communicating via email or chat with certain parties. Agencies, such as the Information Awareness Office, NSA, GCHQ and the FBI, spend billions of dollars per year to develop, purchase, implement, and operate systems for interception and analysis of data. Similar systems are operated by Iranian secret police to identify and suppress dissidents. The required hardware and software were allegedly installed by German Siemens AG and Finnish Nokia.
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Some governments, such as those of Burma, Iran, North Korea, Mainland China, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, restrict access to content on the Internet within their territories, especially to political and religious content, with domain name and keyword filters.
In Norway, Denmark, Finland, and Sweden, major Internet service providers have voluntarily agreed to restrict access to sites listed by authorities. While this list of forbidden resources is supposed to contain only known child pornography sites, the content of the list is secret.
Many countries, including the United States, have enacted laws against the possession or distribution of certain material, such as child pornography, via the Internet but do not mandate filter software. Many free or commercially available software programs, called content-control software are available to users to block offensive specific on individual computers or networks in order to limit access by children to pornographic material or depiction of violence.
In 2011, academic researchers estimated the overall by the Internet to be between 170 and 307 gigawatt, less than two percent of the energy used by humanity. This estimate included the energy needed to build, operate, and periodically replace the estimated 750 million , a billion and 100 million servers worldwide as well as the energy that routers, , , Wi-Fi transmitters and cloud storage devices use when transmitting Internet traffic., (2011). 9781450310598, ACM SIGCOMM. ISBN 9781450310598 According to a non-peer-reviewed study published in 2018 by The Shift Project (a French think tank funded by corporate sponsors), nearly 4% of global CO2 emissions could be attributed to global data transfer and the necessary infrastructure. The study also said that Internet video alone accounted for 60% of this data transfer and therefore contributed to over 300 million tons of CO2 emission per year, and argued for new "digital sobriety" regulations restricting the use and size of video files.
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