What is the Internet?

The Internet isn't just about data; it is an international community of people who share information, interact, and communicate. From the point of view of its users, the Internet is a vast collection of resources--people, information, and multimedia.

If you are reading this online, you're using the Internet: a cooperatively-run collection of computer networks that span the globe.

The Internet isn't run by any organization, and it isn't owned by any organization. Instead, people grow the Internet when they build computer networks and link their network to others. The resulting patchwork of internetworked computers creates a global system of communication.

Technically, the "plumbing" of the Internet is based on a set of rules for data exchange called the TCP/IP protocol suite. When you use the Internet, you'll typically use software that is based on a model for data interchange called the client-server model. Users connecting to the Internet might do so in a several ways and use content on the Internet which may be encoded and presented using media formats.

Read more

• Internet Society. (2000). "History of the Internet. https://www.isoc.org/internet/history-internet/