Tree of routing paths through a portion of the Internet as visualized by the Opte Project. |
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, wireless and optical networking technologies.
The Internet carries a vast range of
information resources and services, such as the inter-linked
hypertext documents of the
World Wide Web (WWW) and the infrastructure to support
electronic mail.
Most traditional communications media including
telephone, music, film, and television are reshaped or redefined by the Internet, giving birth to new services such as
Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and
IPTV. Newspaper, book and other print publishing are adapting to
Web site technology, or are reshaped into
blogging and
web feeds. The Internet has enabled or accelerated new forms of human interactions through
instant messaging,
Internet forums, and
social networking.
Online shopping has boomed both for major retail outlets and small
artisans and traders.
Business-to-business and
financial services on the Internet affect
supply chains across entire industries.
The origins of the Internet reach back to research of the 1960s, commissioned by the
United States government
in collaboration with private commercial interests to build robust,
fault-tolerant, and distributed computer networks. 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
commercialization
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 2009, an estimated one-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.
Terminology
Internet is a short form of the technical term
internetwork,
[1] the result of interconnecting computer networks with special gateways or routers. The Internet is also often referred to as
the Net.
The term
the Internet, when referring to the entire global system of IP networks, has been treated as a
proper noun and written with an initial
capital letter.
In the media and popular culture a trend has also developed to regard
it as a generic term or common noun and thus write it as "the internet",
without capitalization. Some guides specify that the word should be
capitalized as a noun but not capitalized as an adjective.
[2][3]
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 hardware and software
infrastructure of the Internet establishes a global data communications system 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.
[4]
History
Research into
packet switching started in the early 1960s and packet switched networks such as
ARPANET,
Mark I at
NPL in the UK,
[5] CYCLADES,
[6][7] Merit Network,
[8] Tymnet, and
Telenet, were developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s using a variety of
protocols. The ARPANET in particular led to the development of protocols for
internetworking, where multiple separate networks could be joined together into a network of networks.
The first two nodes of what would become the
ARPANET were interconnected between
Leonard Kleinrock's Network Measurement Center at the
UCLA's School of Engineering and Applied Science and
Douglas Engelbart's NLS system at
SRI International (SRI) in
Menlo Park, California, on 29 October 1969.
[9] The third site on the ARPANET was the Culler-Fried Interactive Mathematics center at the
University of California at Santa Barbara, and the fourth was the
University of Utah
Graphics Department. In an early sign of future growth, there were
already fifteen sites connected to the young ARPANET by the end of 1971.
[10][11] These early years were documented in the 1972 film
Computer Networks: The Heralds of Resource Sharing.
Early international collaborations on ARPANET were sparse. For
various political reasons, European developers were concerned with
developing the
X.25 networks.
[12] Notable exceptions were the
Norwegian Seismic Array (
NORSAR) in 1972, followed in 1973 by Sweden with satellite links to the
Tanum Earth Station and
Peter Kirstein's research group in the UK, initially at the
Institute of Computer Science, London University and later at
University College London.
[13]
T3 NSFNET Backbone, c. 1992
In 1982 the
Internet Protocol Suite
(TCP/IP) was standardized and the concept of a world-wide network of
fully interconnected TCP/IP networks called the Internet was introduced.
Access to the ARPANET was expanded in 1981 when the
National Science Foundation (NSF) developed the
Computer Science Network (CSNET). In December 1974,
RFC 675
– Specification of Internet Transmission Control Program, by Vinton Cerf, Yogen Dalal, and Carl Sunshine, used the term
internet, as a shorthand for
internetworking; later
RFCs repeat this use, so the word started out as an
adjective rather than the
noun it is today.
[14]
TCP/IP network access expanded again in 1986 when
NSFNET provided access to
supercomputer sites in the United States from research and education organizations, first at 56 kbit/s and later at 1.5 Mbit/s and 45 Mbit/s.
[15] Commercial
internet service providers
(ISPs) began to emerge in the late 1980s and 1990s. The ARPANET was
decommissioned in 1990. The Internet was commercialized in 1995 when
NSFNET was decommissioned, removing the last restrictions on the use of
the Internet to carry commercial traffic.
[16] The Internet started a rapid expansion to Europe and Australia in the mid to late 1980s
[17][18] and to Asia in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
[19]
Since the mid-1990s the Internet has had a tremendous impact on
culture and commerce, including the rise of near instant communication
by
electronic mail,
instant messaging,
Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) "phone calls",
two-way interactive video calls, and the
World Wide Web[20] with its
discussion forums,
blogs,
social networking, and
online shopping
sites. Increasing amounts of data are transmitted at higher and higher
speeds over fiber optic networks operating at 1-Gbit/s, 10-Gbit/s, or
more. The Internet continues to grow, driven by ever greater amounts of
online information and knowledge, commerce, entertainment and
social networking.
[21]
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%.
[22]
This growth is often attributed to the lack of central administration,
which allows organic growth of the network, as well as the
non-proprietary open nature of the Internet protocols, which encourages
vendor interoperability and prevents any one company from exerting too
much control over the network.
[23] As of 31 March 2011, the estimated total number of
Internet users was 2.095 billion (30.2% of world population).
[24] 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.
[25]
Technology
Protocols
The communications infrastructure of the Internet consists of its
hardware components and a system of software layers that control various
aspects of the architecture. While the hardware can often be used to
support other software systems, it is the design and the rigorous
standardization process of the software architecture 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 delegated to the
Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).
[26]
The IETF conducts standard-setting work groups, open to any individual,
about the various aspects of Internet architecture. Resulting
discussions and final standards are published in a series of
publications, each called a
Request for Comments
(RFC), freely available 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 (BCP) when
implementing Internet technologies.
The Internet Standards describe a framework known as the
Internet Protocol Suite. This is a model architecture that divides methods into a layered system of protocols (
RFC 1122
,
RFC 1123
). The layers correspond to the environment or scope in which their services operate. At the top is the
Application Layer,
the space for the application-specific networking methods used in
software applications, e.g., a web browser program. Below this top
layer, the
Transport Layer connects applications on
different hosts via the network (e.g.,
client–server model)
with appropriate data exchange methods. Underlying these layers are the
core networking technologies, consisting of two layers. The
Internet Layer enables computers to identify and locate each other via
Internet Protocol (IP) addresses,
and allows them to connect to one-another via intermediate (transit)
networks. Lastly, at the bottom of the architecture, is a software
layer, the
Link Layer, that provides connectivity between hosts on the same local network link, such as a local area network (
LAN) or a
dial-up connection. The model, also known as
TCP/IP,
is designed to be independent of the underlying hardware which the
model therefore does not concern itself with in any detail. Other models
have been developed, such as the
Open Systems Interconnection
(OSI) model, but they are not compatible in the details of description,
nor implementation, but many similarities exist and the TCP/IP
protocols are usually included in the discussion of OSI networking.
The most prominent component of the Internet model is the
Internet Protocol (IP) which provides addressing systems (
IP addresses) for computers on the Internet. IP enables
internetworking and essentially establishes the Internet itself. IP Version 4 (
IPv4)
is the initial version used on the first generation of the today's
Internet and is still in dominant use. It was designed to address up to
~4.3 billion (10
9) Internet hosts. However, the explosive growth of the Internet has led to
IPv4 address exhaustion which has enter its final stage in 2011,
[27] when the global address allocation pool was exhausted. A new protocol version,
IPv6,
was developed in the mid 1990s which provides vastly larger addressing
capabilities and more efficient routing of Internet traffic.
IPv6 is currently in growing
deployment around the world, since Internet address registries (
RIRs) began to urge all resource managers to plan rapid adoption and conversion.
[28]
IPv6 is not interoperable with IPv4. It essentially establishes a
parallel version of the Internet not directly accessible with IPv4
software. This means software upgrades or translator facilities are
necessary for networking devices that need to communicate on both
networks. Most modern computer operating systems already support both
versions of the Internet Protocol. Network infrastructures, however, are
still lagging in this development. Aside from the complex array of
physical connections that make up its infrastructure, the Internet is
facilitated by bi- or multi-lateral commercial contracts (e.g.,
peering agreements), and by technical specifications or
protocols that describe how to exchange
data over the network. Indeed, the Internet is defined by its interconnections and routing policies.
Structure
The Internet structure and its usage characteristics have been
studied extensively. It has been determined that both the Internet IP
routing structure and hypertext links of the World Wide Web are examples
of
scale-free networks.
[29] Similar to the way the commercial Internet providers connect via
Internet exchange points, research networks tend to interconnect into large subnetworks such as
GEANT,
GLORIAD,
Internet2, and the UK's
national research and education network JANET. These in turn are built around smaller networks (see also the list of
academic computer network organizations).
Many computer scientists describe the Internet as a "prime example of
a large-scale, highly engineered, yet highly complex system".
[30] The Internet is heterogeneous; for instance,
data transfer rates and physical characteristics of connections vary widely. The Internet exhibits "
emergent phenomena" that depend on its large-scale organization. For example, data transfer rates exhibit temporal
self-similarity.
The principles of the routing and addressing methods for traffic in the
Internet reach back to their origins the 1960s when the eventual scale
and popularity of the network could not be anticipated. Thus, the
possibility of developing alternative structures is investigated.
[31] The Internet structure was found to be highly robust
[32] to random failures and very vulnerable to high degree attacks.
[33]
Governance
The Internet is a
globally distributed network
comprising many voluntarily interconnected autonomous networks. It
operates without a central governing body. However, to maintain
interoperability, all technical and policy aspects of the underlying
core infrastructure and the principal
name spaces are administered by the
Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), headquartered in
Marina del Rey, California. ICANN is the authority that coordinates the assignment of unique identifiers for use on the Internet, including
domain names,
Internet Protocol (IP) addresses, application port numbers in the
transport protocols, and many other parameters. Globally unified name
spaces, in which names and numbers are uniquely assigned, are essential
for the global reach of the Internet. ICANN is governed by an
international board of directors drawn from across the Internet
technical, business, academic, and other non-commercial communities. The
government of the United States continues to have the primary role in
approving changes to the
DNS root zone that lies at the heart of the domain name system.
[34]
ICANN's role in coordinating the assignment of unique identifiers
distinguishes it as perhaps the only central coordinating body on the
global Internet. On 16 November 2005, the
World Summit on the Information Society, held in
Tunis, established the
Internet Governance Forum (IGF) to discuss Internet-related issues.
Modern uses
The Internet allows greater flexibility in working hours and
location, especially with the spread of unmetered high-speed
connections. The Internet can be accessed almost anywhere by numerous
means, including through
mobile Internet devices. Mobile phones,
datacards,
handheld game consoles and
cellular routers allow users to connect to the Internet
wirelessly.
Within the limitations imposed by small screens and other limited
facilities of such pocket-sized devices, the services of the Internet,
including email and the web, may be available. Service providers may
restrict the services offered and mobile data charges may be
significantly higher than other access methods.
Educational material at all levels from pre-school to post-doctoral is available from
websites. Examples range from
CBeebies, through school and high-school revision guides,
virtual universities, to access to top-end scholarly literature through the likes of
Google Scholar. For
distance education, help with
homework
and other assignments, self-guided learning, whiling away spare time,
or just looking up more detail on an interesting fact, it has never been
easier for people to access educational information at any level from
anywhere. The Internet in general and the
World Wide Web in particular are important enablers of both
formal and
informal education.
The low cost and nearly instantaneous sharing of ideas, knowledge, and skills has made
collaborative work dramatically easier, with the help of
collaborative software.
Not only can a group cheaply communicate and share ideas, but the wide
reach of the Internet allows such groups more easily to form. An example
of this is the
free software movement, which has produced, among other things,
Linux,
Mozilla Firefox, and
OpenOffice.org. Internet chat, whether in the form of an
IRC chat room or channel, via an
instant messaging system, or a
social networking
website, allows colleagues to stay in touch in a very convenient way
when working at their computers during the day. Messages can be
exchanged even more quickly and conveniently than via email. These
systems may allow files to be exchanged, drawings and images to be
shared, or voice and video contact between team members.
Content management
systems allow collaborating teams to work on shared sets of documents
simultaneously without accidentally destroying each other's work.
Business and project teams can share calendars as well as documents and
other information. Such collaboration occurs in a wide variety of areas
including scientific research, software development, conference
planning, political activism and creative writing. Social and political
collaboration is also becoming more widespread as both Internet access
and
computer literacy spread.
The Internet allows computer users to
remotely access other computers and information stores easily, wherever they may be. They may do this with or without
computer security,
i.e. authentication and encryption technologies, depending on the
requirements. This is encouraging new ways of working from home,
collaboration and information sharing in many industries. An
accountant sitting at home can
audit the books of a company based in another country, on a
server
situated in a third country that is remotely maintained by IT
specialists in a fourth. These accounts could have been created by
home-working bookkeepers, in other remote locations, based on
information emailed to them from offices all over the world. Some of
these things were possible before the widespread use of the Internet,
but the cost of private
leased lines
would have made many of them infeasible in practice. An office worker
away from their desk, perhaps on the other side of the world on a
business trip or a holiday, can access their emails, access their data
using
cloud computing, or open a
remote desktop session into their office PC using a secure
Virtual Private Network
(VPN) connection on the Internet. This can give the worker complete
access to all of their normal files and data, including email and other
applications, while away from the office. This concept has been referred
to among
system administrators as the Virtual Private Nightmare,
[35] because it extends the secure perimeter of a corporate network into remote locations and its employees' homes.
Services
Information
Many people use the terms
Internet and
World Wide Web, or just the
Web, interchangeably, but the two terms are not
synonymous. The
World Wide Web is a global set of
documents,
images and other resources, logically interrelated by
hyperlinks and referenced with
Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs). URIs symbolically identify services,
servers, and other databases, and the documents and resources that they can provide.
Hypertext Transfer Protocol
(HTTP) is the main access protocol of the World Wide Web, but it is
only one of the hundreds of communication protocols used on the
Internet.
Web services also use HTTP to allow software systems to communicate in order to share and exchange business logic and data.
World Wide Web browser software, such as
Microsoft's
Internet Explorer,
Mozilla Firefox,
Opera,
Apple's
Safari, and
Google Chrome,
lets users navigate from one web page to another via hyperlinks
embedded in the documents. These documents may also contain any
combination of
computer data, including graphics, sounds,
text,
video,
multimedia and interactive content that runs while the user is interacting with the page.
Client-side software can include
animations,
games,
office applications and scientific demonstrations. Through
keyword-driven
Internet research using
search engines like
Yahoo! and
Google,
users worldwide have easy, instant access to a vast and diverse amount
of online information. Compared to printed media, books,
encyclopedias and traditional
libraries, the World Wide Web has enabled the decentralization of information on a large scale.
The Web has also enabled individuals and organizations to
publish ideas and information to a potentially large
audience online at greatly reduced expense and time delay. Publishing a web page, a blog, or building a website involves little initial
cost
and many cost-free services are available. Publishing and maintaining
large, professional web sites with attractive, diverse and up-to-date
information is still a difficult and expensive proposition, however.
Many individuals and some companies and groups use
web logs or blogs, which are largely used as easily updatable online diaries. Some commercial organizations encourage
staff
to communicate advice in their areas of specialization in the hope that
visitors will be impressed by the expert knowledge and free
information, and be attracted to the corporation as a result. One
example of this practice is
Microsoft, whose
product developers
publish their personal blogs in order to pique the public's interest in
their work. Collections of personal web pages published by large
service providers remain popular, and have become increasingly
sophisticated. Whereas operations such as
Angelfire and
GeoCities
have existed since the early days of the Web, newer offerings from, for
example, Facebook and MySpace currently have large followings. These
operations often brand themselves as
social network services rather than simply as web page hosts.
Advertising on popular web pages can be lucrative, and
e-commerce or the sale of products and services directly via the Web continues to grow.
When the Web began in the 1990s, a typical web page was stored in completed form on a web server, formatted in
HTML,
ready to be sent to a user's browser in response to a request. Over
time, the process of creating and serving web pages has become more
automated and more dynamic. Websites are often created using
content management or
wiki
software with, initially, very little content. Contributors to these
systems, who may be paid staff, members of a club or other organization
or members of the public, fill underlying databases with content using
editing pages designed for that purpose, while casual visitors view and
read this content in its final HTML form. There may or may not be
editorial, approval and security systems built into the process of
taking newly entered content and making it available to the target
visitors.
Communication
Electronic mail,
or email, is an important communications service available on the
Internet. The concept of sending electronic text messages between
parties in a way analogous to mailing letters or memos predates the
creation of the Internet. Pictures, documents and other files are sent
as
email attachments. Emails can be
cc-ed to multiple
email addresses.
Internet telephony is another common communications service made possible by the creation of the Internet.
VoIP stands for Voice-over-
Internet Protocol, referring to the protocol that underlies all Internet communication. The idea began in the early 1990s with
walkie-talkie-like
voice applications for personal computers. In recent years many VoIP
systems have become as easy to use and as convenient as a normal
telephone. The benefit is that, as the Internet carries the voice
traffic, VoIP can be free or cost much less than a traditional telephone
call, especially over long distances and especially for those with
always-on Internet connections such as
cable or
ADSL.
VoIP is maturing into a competitive alternative to traditional
telephone service. Interoperability between different providers has
improved and the ability to call or receive a call from a traditional
telephone is available. Simple, inexpensive VoIP network adapters are
available that eliminate the need for a personal computer.
Voice quality can still vary from call to call but is often equal to
and can even exceed that of traditional calls. Remaining problems for
VoIP include
emergency telephone number
dialing and reliability. Currently, a few VoIP providers provide an
emergency service, but it is not universally available. Traditional
phones are line-powered and operate during a power failure; VoIP does
not do so without a
backup power source
for the phone equipment and the Internet access devices. VoIP has also
become increasingly popular for gaming applications, as a form of
communication between players. Popular VoIP clients for gaming include
Ventrilo and
Teamspeak.
Wii,
PlayStation 3, and
Xbox 360 also offer VoIP chat features.
Data transfer
File sharing is an example of transferring large amounts of data across the Internet. A
computer file can be emailed to customers, colleagues and friends as an attachment. It can be uploaded to a website or
FTP server for easy download by others. It can be put into a "shared location" or onto a
file server for instant use by colleagues. The load of bulk downloads to many users can be eased by the use of "
mirror" servers or
peer-to-peer networks. 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. These simple features of the Internet, over a
worldwide basis, are changing the production, sale, and distribution of
anything that can be reduced to a computer file for transmission. This
includes all manner of print publications, software products, news,
music, film, video, photography, graphics and the other arts. This in
turn has caused seismic shifts in each of the existing industries that
previously controlled the production and distribution of these products.
Streaming media
is the real-time delivery of digital media for the immediate
consumption or enjoyment by end users. Many radio and television
broadcasters provide Internet feeds of their live audio and video
productions. They may also allow time-shift viewing or listening such as
Preview, Classic Clips and Listen Again features. These providers have
been joined by a range of pure Internet "broadcasters" who never had
on-air licenses. This means that an Internet-connected device, such as a
computer or something more specific, can be used to access on-line
media in much the same way as was previously possible only with a
television or radio receiver. The range of available types of content is
much wider, from specialized technical
webcasts to on-demand popular multimedia services.
Podcasting is a variation on this theme, where—usually audio—material is downloaded and played back on a computer or shifted to a
portable media player
to be listened to on the move. These techniques using simple equipment
allow anybody, with little censorship or licensing control, to broadcast
audio-visual material worldwide.
Digital media streaming increases the demand for network bandwidth.
For example, standard image quality needs 1 Mbit/s link speed for SD
480p, HD 720p quality requires 2.5 Mbit/s, and the top-of-the-line HDX
quality needs 4.5 Mbit/s for 1080p.
[36]
Webcams
are a low-cost extension of this phenomenon. While some webcams can
give full-frame-rate video, the picture is usually either small or
updates slowly. Internet users can watch animals around an African
waterhole, ships in the
Panama Canal, traffic at a local roundabout or monitor their own premises, live and in real time. Video
chat rooms and
video conferencing
are also popular with many uses being found for personal webcams, with
and without two-way sound. YouTube was founded on 15 February 2005 and
is now the leading website for free streaming video with a vast number
of users. It uses a
flash-based
web player to stream and show video files. Registered users may upload
an unlimited amount of video and build their own personal profile.
YouTube claims that its users watch hundreds of millions, and upload
hundreds of thousands of videos daily.
[37]
Access
The prevalent language for communication on the Internet has been
English. This may be a result of the origin of the Internet, as well as
the language's role as a
lingua franca. Early computer systems were limited to the characters in the
American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII), a subset of the
Latin alphabet.
After English (27%), the most requested languages on the
World Wide Web
are Chinese (23%), Spanish (8%), Japanese (5%), Portuguese and German
(4% each), Arabic, French and Russian (3% each), and Korean (2%).
[38] By region, 42% of the world's
Internet users are based in Asia, 24% in Europe, 14% in North America, 10% in
Latin America and the
Caribbean taken together, 6% in Africa, 3% in the Middle East and 1% in Australia/
Oceania.
[39] The Internet's technologies have developed enough in recent years, especially in the use of
Unicode,
that good facilities are available 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.
Common methods of
Internet access in homes include
dial-up, landline
broadband (over
coaxial cable,
fiber optic or
copper wires),
Wi-Fi,
satellite and
3G/
4G technology
cell phones. Public places to use the Internet include libraries and
Internet cafes, where computers with Internet connections are available. There are also
Internet access points
in many public places such as airport halls and coffee shops, in some
cases just for brief use while standing. Various terms are used, such as
"public Internet kiosk", "public access terminal", and "Web
payphone".
Many hotels now also have public terminals, though these are usually
fee-based. These terminals are widely accessed for various usage like
ticket booking, bank deposit, online payment etc. Wi-Fi provides
wireless access to computer networks, and therefore can do so to the
Internet itself.
Hotspots providing such access include
Wi-Fi cafes, where would-be users need to bring their own wireless-enabled devices such as a laptop or
PDA.
These services may be free to all, free to customers only, or
fee-based. A hotspot need not be limited to a confined location. A whole
campus or park, or even an entire city can be enabled.
Grassroots efforts have led to
wireless community networks. Commercial Wi-Fi services covering large city areas are in place in London,
Vienna,
Toronto, San Francisco,
Philadelphia, Chicago and
Pittsburgh. The Internet can then be accessed from such places as a park bench.
[40] Apart from Wi-Fi, there have been experiments with proprietary mobile wireless networks like
Ricochet, various high-speed data services over cellular phone networks, and fixed wireless services. High-end mobile phones such as
smartphones generally come with Internet access through the phone network. Web browsers such as
Opera
are available on these advanced handsets, which can also run a wide
variety of other Internet software. More mobile phones have Internet
access than PCs, though this is not as widely used.
[41] An Internet access provider and protocol matrix differentiates the methods used to get online.
An Internet blackout or outage can be caused by local signaling interruptions. Disruptions of
submarine communications cables may cause blackouts or slowdowns to large areas, such as in the
2008 submarine cable disruption. Internet blackouts affecting almost entire countries can be achieved by governments as a form of
Internet censorship, as in the blockage of the
Internet in Egypt, whereby approximately 93%
[42] of networks were without access in 2011 in an attempt to stop mobilization for
anti-government protests.
[43]
In an American study in 2005, the percentage of men using the
Internet was very slightly ahead of the percentage of women, although
this difference reversed in those under 30. Men logged on more often,
spend more time online, and are more likely to be
broadband
users, whereas women tended to make more use of opportunities to
communicate (such as email). Men were more likely to use the Internet to
pay bills, participate in auctions, and for recreation such as
downloading music and videos. Men and women were equally likely to use
the Internet for shopping and banking.
[44] More recent studies indicate that in 2008, women significantly outnumbered men on most social networking sites, such as
Facebook and
Myspace, although the ratios varied with age.
[45] In addition, women watched more streaming content, whereas men downloaded more.
[46] In terms of
blogs,
men were more likely to blog in the first place; among those who blog,
men were more likely to have a professional blog, whereas women were
more likely to have a personal blog.
[47]
Overall Internet usage has seen tremendous growth. From 2000 to 2009,
the number of Internet users globally rose from 394 million to 1.858
billion.
[48] By 2010, 22 percent of the world's population had access to computers with 1 billion
Google searches every day, 300 million Internet users reading blogs, and 2 billion videos viewed daily on
YouTube.
[49]
Social impact
The Internet has enabled entirely new forms of social interaction,
activities, and organizing, thanks to its basic features such as
widespread usability and access.
Social networking
websites such as Facebook, Twitter and MySpace have created new ways to
socialize and interact. Users of these sites are able to add a wide
variety of information to pages, to pursue common interests, and to
connect with others. It is also possible to find existing acquaintances,
to allow communication among existing groups of people. Sites like
LinkedIn foster commercial and business connections. YouTube and
Flickr specialize in users' videos and photographs.
In the first decade of the 21st century the first generation is
raised with widespread availability of Internet connectivity, bringing
consequences and concerns in areas such as personal privacy and
identity, and distribution of copyrighted materials. These "
digital natives" face a variety of challenges that were not present for prior generations.
The Internet has achieved new relevance as a political tool, leading to
Internet censorship by some states. The presidential campaign of
Howard Dean
in 2004 in the United States was notable for its success in soliciting
donation via the Internet. Many political groups use the Internet to
achieve a new method of organizing in order to carry out their mission,
having given rise to
Internet activism, most notably practiced by rebels in the
Arab Spring.
[50] Some governments, such as those of
Iran,
North Korea,
Myanmar, the People's Republic of China, and
Saudi Arabia,
restrict what people in their countries can access on the Internet,
especially political and religious content. This is accomplished through
software that filters domains and content so that they may not be
easily accessed or obtained without elaborate circumvention.
[51]
In Norway, Denmark, Finland, and Sweden, major Internet service
providers have voluntarily, possibly to avoid such an arrangement being
turned into law, agreed to restrict access to sites listed by
authorities. While this list of forbidden URLs is only supposed to
contain addresses of known child pornography sites, the content of the
list is secret.
[52]
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 filtering software. There are many
free and commercially available software programs, called
content-control software,
with which a user can choose to block offensive websites on individual
computers or networks, in order to limit a child's access to
pornographic materials or depiction of violence.
The Internet has been a major outlet for leisure activity since its inception, with entertaining social experiments such as
MUDs and
MOOs being conducted on university servers, and humor-related
Usenet groups receiving much traffic. Today, many
Internet forums have sections devoted to games and funny videos; short cartoons in the form of
Flash movies
are also popular. Over 6 million people use blogs or message boards as a
means of communication and for the sharing of ideas. The pornography
and
gambling
industries have taken advantage of the World Wide Web, and often
provide a significant source of advertising revenue for other websites.
[53]
Although many governments have attempted to restrict both industries'
use of the Internet, this has generally failed to stop their widespread
popularity.
[54]
One main area of leisure activity on the Internet is
multiplayer gaming.
[55]
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 and
MPlayer.
[56]
Non-subscribers were limited to certain types of game play or certain
games. Many people use the Internet to access and download music, movies
and other works for their enjoyment and relaxation. Free and fee-based
services exist for all of these activities, using centralized servers
and distributed peer-to-peer technologies. Some of these sources
exercise more care with respect to the original artists' copyrights than
others.
Many people use the World Wide Web to access news, weather and sports
reports, to plan and book vacations and to find out more about their
interests. People use
chat,
messaging and email to make and stay in touch with friends worldwide, sometimes in the same way as some previously had
pen pals. The Internet has seen a growing number of
Web desktops, where users can access their files and settings via the Internet.
Cyberslacking
can become a drain on corporate resources; the average UK employee
spent 57 minutes a day surfing the Web while at work, according to a
2003 study by Peninsula Business Services.
[57] Internet addiction disorder is excessive computer use that interferes with daily life. Some psychologists believe that Internet use has other
effects on individuals for instance interfering with the deep thinking that leads to true creativity.
[58]
Internet usage has been correlated to users' loneliness.
[59] 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.
See also
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- ^ Celebrating 40 years of the net
, by Mark Ward, Technology correspondent, BBC News, October 29, 2009
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External links
Organizations
Articles, books, and journals
- First Monday
, a peer-reviewed journal on the Internet established in 1996 as a Great Cities Initiative of the University Library of the University of Illinois at Chicago, ISSN: 1396-0466
- Rise of the Network Society
, Manual Castells, Wiley-Blackwell, 1996 (1st ed) and 2009 (2nd ed), ISBN: 978-1-4051-9686-4
- "The Internet: Changing the Way We Communicate"
in America's Investment in the Future
, National Science Foundation, Arlington, Va. USA, 2000
- “Lessons from the History of the Internet”
, Manuel Castells, in The Internet Galaxy, Ch. 1, pp 9–35, Oxford University Press, 2001, ISBN13: 978-0-19-925577-1 ISBN10: 0-19-925577-6
- "Media Freedom Internet Cookbook"
by the OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media Vienna, 2004
- "How Much Does The Internet Weigh?
", by Stephen Cass, Discover, 2007
- "Mapping a medusa: The Internet spreads its tentacles"
, Julie Rehmeyer, Science News, Vol. 171, No. 25, pp. 387–388, 23 June 2007
