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Internet ○˒｜Definition｜1st｜20251119205401-00-⌔
Internet
The Internet (or internet)1 is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP)2 to communicate between networks and devices. It is a network of networks that comprises private, public, academic, business, and government networks of local to global scope, linked by electronic, wireless, and optical networking technologies. The Internet carries a vast range of information services and resources, such as the interlinked hypertext documents and applications of the World Wide Web (WWW), electronic mail, discussion groups, internet telephony, streaming media and file sharing.
Most traditional communication media, including telephone, radio, television, paper mail, newspapers, and print publishing, have been transformed by the Internet, giving rise to new media such as email, online music, digital newspapers, news aggregators, and audio and video streaming websites. The Internet has enabled and accelerated new forms of personal interaction through instant messaging, Internet forums, 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 supply chains across entire industries.
The origins of the Internet date back to research that enabled the time-sharing of computer resources, the development of packet switching, and the design of computer networks for data communication.34 The set of communication protocols to enable internetworking on the Internet arose from research and development commissioned in the 1970s by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) of the United States Department of Defense in collaboration with universities and researchers across the United States, United Kingdom and France.567
The Internet has no single centralized governance in either technological implementation or policies for access and usage. Each constituent network sets its own policies.8 The overarching definitions of the two principal name spaces on the Internet, the Internet Protocol 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).
Printed 2026-06-28.
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Link to original Footnotes
See Capitalization of Internet ↩
Despite the name, TCP/IP also includes UDP traffic, which is of significant size. ↩
“A Flaw in the Design”. The Washington Post. 30 May 2015. Archived from the original on 8 November 2020. Retrieved 20 February 2020. The Internet was born of a big idea: Messages could be chopped into chunks, sent through a network in a series of transmissions, then reassembled by destination computers quickly and efficiently. Historians credit seminal insights to Welsh scientist Donald W. Davies and American engineer Paul Baran… The most important institutional force… was the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA)… as ARPA began work on a groundbreaking computer network, the agency recruited scientists affiliated with the nation’s top universities. ↩
Yates, David M. (1997). Turing’s Legacy: A History of Computing at the National Physical Laboratory 1945-1995. National Museum of Science and Industry. pp. 132–4. ISBN 978-0-901805-94-2. Davies’s invention of packet switching and design of computer communication networks… were a cornerstone of the development which led to the Internet ↩
Abbate 1999, p. 3 “The manager of the ARPANET project, Lawrence Roberts, assembled a large team of computer scientists… and he drew on the ideas of network experimenters in the United States and the United Kingdom. Cerf and Kahn also enlisted the help of computer scientists from England, France and the United States” ↩
“The Computer History Museum, SRI International, and BBN Celebrate the 40th Anniversary of First ARPANET Transmission, Precursor to Today’s Internet”. SRI International. 27 October 2009. Archived from the original on 29 March 2019. Retrieved 25 September 2017. But the ARPANET itself had now become an island, with no links to the other networks that had sprung up. By the early 1970s, researchers in France, the UK, and the U.S. began developing ways of connecting networks to each other, a process known as internetworking. ↩
by Vinton Cerf, as told to Bernard Aboba (1993). “How the Internet Came to Be”. Archived from the original on 26 September 2017. Retrieved 25 September 2017. We began doing concurrent implementations at Stanford, BBN, and University College London. So effort at developing the Internet protocols was international from the beginning. ↩
Strickland, Jonathan (3 March 2008). “How Stuff Works: Who owns the Internet?”. Archived from the original on 19 June 2014. Retrieved 27 June 2014. ↩
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