TRUE INTERNET WORLD

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.