Internet

The Internet is a global network connecting millions of computers. More than 190 countries are linked into exchanges of data, news and opinions. According to Internet Live Stats, as of December 30, 2014 there was an estimated 3,037,608,300 Internet users worldwide. The number of Internet users represents nearly 40 percent of the world's population. The largest number of Internet users by country is China, followed by the United States and India.

In September 2014, the total number of websites with a unique hostname online exceeded 1 billion. This is an increase from one website (info.cern.ch) in 1991. 

The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite(TCP/IP) to link several billion devices worldwide. It is a network of networks^[1] 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), the infrastructure to support email, and peer-to-peer networks for file sharing and telephony.

Many concepts and debates on technology, which shaped the Internet, date back to research commissioned by theUnited States government in the 1960s to build robust, fault-tolerant communication via computer networks.^[2] This work evolved into efforts in the United Kingdom and France, that led to the primary precursor network, the ARPANET, in the United States. In the 1980s, the work of Tim Berners-Lee, in the United Kingdom on the World Wide Web, theorised the fact that protocols link hypertext documents into a working system,^[3] hence marking the beginning the modern Internet.^[4] From the early 1990s, the network experienced sustained exponential growth as generations of institutional, personal, and mobile computers were connected to it.

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.^[5] Though the Internet has been widely used by academia since the 1980s, thecommercialization of what was by the 1990s an international network resulted in its popularization and incorporation into virtually every aspect of modern human life. As of December 2014, 37.9 percent of the world's human populationhas used the services of the Internet within the past year--over 100 times more people than were using it in 1995.^[6][7]Internet use grew rapidly in the West from the mid-1990s to early 2000s and from the late 1990s to present in thedeveloping world. In 1994 only 3% of American classrooms had access to the Internet, while by 2002 that figure was 92%.^[8]

Who Owns the Internet?

No one actually owns the Internet, and no single person or organization controls the Internet in its entirety. The Internet is more of a concept than an actual tangible entity, and it relies on a physical infrastructure that connects networks to other networks.

Is Web and Internet the Same?

The Internet is not synonymous with World Wide Web. The Internet is a massive network of networks, a networking infrastructure. It connects millions of computers together globally, forming a network in which any computer can communicate with any other computer as long as they are both connected to the Internet. The World Wide Web, or simply Web, is a way of accessing information over the medium of the Internet. It is an information-sharing model that is built on top of the Internet.

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