In·ter·net (ĭn'tər-nĕt')
n.
An interconnected system of networks that connects computers around the world via the TCP/IP protocol.
Internet
A worldwide telecommunications network of business, government, and personal computers.
The Internet is a network of computers linking the United States with the rest of the world. Originally developed as a way for U.S. research scientists to communicate with each other, by the mid-1990s the Internet had become a popular form of telecommunication for personal computer users. The dramatic growth in the number of persons using the network heralded the most important change in telecommunications since the introduction of television in the late 1940s. However, the sudden popularity of a new, unregulated communications technology raised many issues for U.S. law.
The Internet, popularly called the Net, was created in 1969 for the U.S. Department of Defense. Funding from the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) allowed researchers to experiment with methods for computers to communicate with each other. Their creation, the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), originally linked only four separate computer sites at U.S. universities and research institutes, where it was used primarily by scientists.
In the early 1970s, other countries began to join ARPANET, and within a decade it was widely accessible to researchers, administrators, and students throughout the world. The National Science Foundation (NSF) assumed responsibility for linking these users of ARPANET, which was dismantled in 1990. The NSF Network (NSFNET) now serves as the technical backbone for all Internet communications in the United States.
The Internet grew at a fast pace in the 1990s as the general population discovered the power of the new medium. A significant portion of the Net's content is written text, in the form of both electronic mail (E-mail) and articles posted in an electronic discussion forum known as the Usenet news groups. In the mid-1990s the appearance of the World Wide Web made the Internet even more popular. The Web is a multimedia interface that allows for the transmission of text, pictures, audio, and video together, known as Web pages, which commonly resemble pages in a magazine. Together these various elements have made the Internet a medium for communication and for the retrieval of information on virtually any topic.
The sudden growth of the Internet caught the legal system unprepared. Before 1996 there was little federal legislation on this form of telecommunication. In 1986 Congress passed the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) (18 U.S.C.A. § 2701 et seq. [1996]), which made it illegal to read private E-mail. The ECPA extended most of the protection already granted to conventional mail to electronic mail. Just as the post office may not read private letters, neither can the providers of private bulletin boards, on-line services, or Internet access. However, law enforcement agencies can subpoena E-mail in a criminal investigation. The ECPA also permits employers to read their workers' E-mail. This provision was intended to protect companies against industrial spying but has generated lawsuits from employees who objected to the invasion of their privacy. Federal courts, however, have allowed employers to secretly monitor an employee's E-mail on a company-owned computer system, concluding that employees have no reasonable expectation of privacy when they use company E-mail.
Criminal activity on the Internet generally falls into the category of computer crime. It includes so-called hacking, or sneaking into computer systems, stealing account passwords and credit-card numbers, and illegally copying intellectual property. Because personal computers can easily copy information—including everything from software to photographs and books—and the information can be sent anywhere in the world quickly, it has become much more difficult for copyright owners to protect their work.
Public and legislative attention has focused on Internet content, specifically sexually explicit material. The distribution of pornography became a major concern in the 1990s, as private individuals and businesses found an unregulated means of giving away or selling pornographic images. As hard-core and child pornography proliferated, Congress sought to impose restrictions on obscene and indecent content on the Internet.
In 1996 Congress passed the Communications Decency Act (CDA) as part of the Telecommunications Competition and Deregulation Act of 1996 (47 U.S.C.A. § 223(a)(h)). The CDA forbade the dissemination of obscene or indecent material to children through computer networks or other telecommunications media. The act included penalties for knowing violations of up to five years imprisonment and fines of up to $250,000. First Amendment advocates and on-line services immediately brought suit to challenge the act as an unconstitutional restriction on free speech. A special three-judge federal panel in Pennsylvania agreed with these groups, concluding that the law was overly broad because, in attempting to protect children, it would also limit the speech of adults (American Civil Liberties Union v. Reno, 929 F.Supp. 824 [1996]). On June 26, 1997, the Supreme Court affirmed, finding the challenged provisions overbroad (1997 WL 348012).
Another area of legal concern is the issue of libel. In tort law libel and slander occur when the communication of false information about a person injures the person's good name or reputation. Where the traditional media are concerned, it is well settled that libel suits provide both a means of redress for injury and a punitive corrective against sloppiness and malice. Regarding communication on the Internet, however, there is little case law, especially on the key issue of liability.
In suits against newspapers, courts traditionally held publishers liable, along with their reporters, because publishers were presumed to have reviewed the libelous material prior to publication. Because of this legal standard, publishers and editors are generally careful to review anything they publish. However, the Internet is not a body of material carefully reviewed by a publisher, but an unrestricted flood of information. If a libelous or defamatory statement is posted on the Internet, which is essentially owned by no one, the law is uncertain about whether anyone other than the author can be held liable.
Some courts have held that on-line service providers, companies that connect their subscribers to the Internet, should be held liable if they allow their users to post libelous statements on their sites. An on-line provider is thus viewed like a traditional publisher.
Other courts have rejected the publisher analogy and have instead compared Internet service providers to bookstores. Like bookstores, providers are distributors of information and cannot reasonably be expected to review everything they sell. U.S. libel law gives greater protection to bookstores because of this theory (Smith v. California, 361 U.S. 147, 80 S. Ct. 215, 4 L. Ed. 2d 205 [1959]), and some courts have applied it to on-line service providers.
The continued growth of the Internet (twenty-four million subscribers in 1995) has placed enormous burdens on telephone networks. Telephone systems were not designed to handle thousands of Internet connections that may last several hours at a time. Telephone companies, concerned about their capacity to handle the volume of both voice and electronic communication, have proposed changing rate structures and raising rates for Internet users that reflect the higher demands placed on the telephone systems.
internet
(Lower case "i"nternet) A large network made up of a number of smaller networks.
(Upper case "I"nternet) The largest network in the world. It is made up of more than 350 million computers in more than 100 countries covering commercial, academic and government endeavors. Originally developed for the U.S. military, the Internet became widely used for academic and commercial research. Users had access to unpublished data and journals on a variety of subjects. Today, the "Net" has become commercialized into a worldwide information highway, providing data and commentary on every subject and product on earth.
E-Mail Was the Beginning
The Internet's surge in growth in the mid-1990s was dramatic, increasing a hundredfold in 1995 and 1996 alone. There were two reasons. Up until then, the major online services (AOL, CompuServe, etc.) provided e-mail, but only to customers of the same service. As they began to connect to the Internet for e-mail exchange, the Internet took on the role of a global switching center. An AOL member could finally send mail to a CompuServe member, and so on. The Internet glued the world together for electronic mail, and today, SMTP, the Internet mail protocol, is the global e-mail standard.
The Web Was the Explosion
Secondly, with the advent of graphics-based Web browsers such as Mosaic and Netscape Navigator, and soon after, Microsoft's Internet Explorer, the World Wide Web took off. The Web became easily available to users with PCs and Macs rather than only scientists and hackers at Unix workstations. Delphi was the first proprietary online service to offer Web access, and all the rest followed. At the same time, new Internet service providers (ISPs) rose out of the woodwork to offer access to individuals and companies. As a result, the Web grew exponentially, providing an information exchange of unprecedented proportion. The Web has also become "the" storehouse for drivers, updates and demos that are downloaded via the browser as well as a global transport for delivering information by subscription, both free and paid.
Newsgroups
Although daily news and information is now available on countless Web sites, long before the Web, information on a myriad of subjects was exchanged via Usenet (User Network) newsgroups. Still thriving, newsgroup articles can be selected and read directly from your Web browser. See Usenet.
Chat Rooms
Chat rooms provide another popular Internet service. Internet Relay Chat (IRC) offers multiuser text conferencing on diverse topics. Dozens of IRC servers provide hundreds of channels that anyone can log onto and participate in via the keyboard. See IRC.
The Original Internet
The Internet started in 1969 as the ARPAnet. Funded by the U.S. government, the ARPAnet became a series of high-speed links between major supercomputer sites and educational and research institutions worldwide, although mostly in the U.S. A major part of its backbone was the National Science Foundation's NFSNet. Along the way, it became known as the "Internet" or simply "the Net." By the 1990s, so many networks had become part of it and so much traffic was not educational or pure research that it became obvious that the Internet was on its way to becoming a commercial venture.
It Went Commercial in 1995
In 1995, the Internet was turned over to large commercial Internet providers (ISPs), such as MCI, Sprint and UUNET, which took responsibility for the backbones and have increasingly enhanced their capacities ever since. Regional ISPs link into these backbones to provide lines for their subscribers, and smaller ISPs hook either directly into the national backbones or into the regional ISPs.
The TCP/IP Protocol
Internet computers use the TCP/IP communications protocol. There are more than 100 million hosts on the Internet, a host being a mainframe or medium to high-end server that is always online via TCP/IP. The Internet is also connected to non-TCP/IP networks worldwide through gateways that convert TCP/IP into other protocols.
Life Before the Web
Before the Web and the graphics-based Web browser, the Internet was accessed from Unix terminals by academicians and scientists using command-driven Unix utilities. These utilities are still used; however, today, they reside in Windows, Mac and Linux machines as well. For example, an FTP program allows files to be uploaded and downloaded, and the Archie utility provides listings of these files. Telnet is a terminal emulation program that lets you log onto a computer on the Internet and run a program. Gopher provides hierarchical menus describing Internet files (not just file names), and Veronica lets you search Gopher sites. See FTP, Archie, Telnet, Gopher and Veronica.
The Next Internet
Ironically, some of the original academic and scientific users of the Internet have developed their own Internet once again. Internet2 is a high-speed academic research network that was started in much the same fashion as the original Internet (see Internet2). See Web vs. Internet, World Wide Web, how to search the Web, intranet, NAP, hot topics and trends, IAB, information superhighway and online service.
Internet
The mother of all networks. First incarnated beginning in 1969 as the ARPANET, a U.S. Department of Defense research testbed. Though it has been widely believed that the goal was to develop a network architecture for military command-and-control that could survive disruptions up to and including nuclear war, this is a myth; in fact, ARPANET was conceived from the start as a way to get most economical use out of then-scarce large-computer resources. Robert Herzfeld, who was director of ARPA at the time, has been at some pains to debunk the “survive-a-nuclear-war” myth, but it seems unkillable.
As originally imagined, ARPANET's major use would have been to support what is now called remote login and more sophisticated forms of distributed computing, but the infant technology of electronic mail quickly grew to dominate actual usage. Universities, research labs and defense contractors early discovered the Internet's potential as a medium of communication between humans and linked up in steadily increasing numbers, connecting together a quirky mix of academics, techies, hippies, SF fans, hackers, and anarchists. The roots of this lexicon lie in those early years.
Over the next quarter-century the Internet evolved in many ways. The typical machine/OS combination moved from DEC PDP-10s and PDP-20s, running TOPS-10 and TOPS-20, to PDP-11s and VAXen and Suns running Unix, and in the 1990s to Unix on Intel microcomputers. The Internet's protocols grew more capable, most notably in the move from NCP/IP to TCP/IP in 1982 and the implementation of Domain Name Service in 1983. It was around this time that people began referring to the collection of interconnected networks with ARPANET at its core as “the Internet”.
The ARPANET had a fairly strict set of participation guidelines -- connected institutions had to be involved with a DOD-related research project. By the mid-80s, many of the organizations clamoring to join didn't fit this profile. In 1986, the National Science Foundation built NSFnet to open up access to its five regional supercomputing centers; NSFnet became the backbone of the Internet, replacing the original ARPANET pipes (which were formally shut down in 1990). Between 1990 and late 1994 the pieces of NSFnet were sold to major telecommunications companies until the Internet backbone had gone completely commercial.
That year, 1994, was also the year the mainstream culture discovered the Internet. Once again, the killer app was not the anticipated one — rather, what caught the public imagination was the hypertext and multimedia features of the World Wide Web. Subsequently the Internet has seen off its only serious challenger (the OSI protocol stack favored by European telecoms monopolies) and is in the process of absorbing into itself many of the proprietary networks built during the second wave of wide-area networking after 1980. By 1996 it had become a commonplace even in mainstream media to predict that a globally-extended Internet would become the key unifying communications technology of the next century.
Internet, the, international computer network linking together thousands of individual networks at military and government agencies, educational institutions, nonprofit organizations, industrial and financial corporations of all sizes, and commercial enterprises (called gateways or service providers) that enable individuals to access the network. The most popular features of the Internet include electronic mail (e-mail), discussion groups (called newsgroups or bulletin boards, where users can post messages and look for responses on a system called Usenet), on-line conversations (called chats), adventure and role-playing games, information retrieval, and electronic commerce (e-commerce).
The public information stored in the multitude of computer networks connected to the Internet forms a huge electronic library, but the enormous quantity of data and number of linked computer networks also make it difficult to find where the desired information resides and then to retrieve it. A number of progressively easier-to-use interfaces and tools have been developed to facilitate searching. Among these are search engines, such as Archie, Gopher, and WAIS (Wide Area Information Server), and a number of commercial indexes, such as Google or Yahoo, which are programs that use a proprietary algorithm or other means to search a large collection of documents for keywords and return a list of documents containing one or more of the keywords. Telnet is a program that allows users of one computer to connect with another, distant computer in a different network. The File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is used to transfer information between computers in different networks. The greatest impetus to the popularization of the Internet came with the introduction of the World Wide Web (WWW), a hypertext system that makes browsing the Internet both fast and intuitive. Most e-commerce occurs over the Web.
Each computer that is directly connected to the Internet is uniquely identified by a 32-bit binary number called its IP address. This address is usually seen as a four-part decimal number, each part equating to 8 bits of the 32-bit address in the decimal range 0–255. Because an address of the form 4.33.222.111 could be difficult to remember, a system of Internet addresses, or domain names, was developed in the 1980s. Reading from left to right, the parts of a domain name go from specific to general. For example, www.irs.ustreas.gov is a World Wide Web site at the Internal Revenue Service, which is part of the U.S. Treasury Dept., which is a government agency. The rightmost part, or top-level domain (or suffix or zone), can be a two-letter abbreviation of the country in which the computer is in operation; more than 250 abbreviations, such as “ca” for Canada and “uk” for United Kingdom, have been assigned. Although such an abbreviation exists for the United States (us), it is more common for a site in the United States to use a specialized top-level domain such as edu (educational institution), gov (government), or mil (military) or one of the four domains designated for open registration worldwide, com (commercial), int (international), net (network), or org (organization). In 2000 seven additional top-level domains (aero, biz, coop, info, museum, name, and pro) were approved for worldwide use, and other domains have since been added. An Internet address is translated into an IP address by a domain-name server, a program running on an Internet-connected computer. Since 1998 the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a nonprofit U.S. corporation, has been responsible for overseeing the domain name system.
The Internet evolved from a secret feasibility study conceived by the U.S. Dept. of Defense in 1969 to test methods of enabling computer networks to survive military attacks, by means of the dynamic rerouting of messages. As the ARPAnet (Advanced Research Projects Agency network), it began by connecting three networks in California with one in Utah—these communicated with one another by a set of rules called the Internet Protocol (IP). By 1972, when the ARPAnet was revealed to the public, it had grown to include about 50 universities and research organizations with defense contracts, and a year later the first international connections were established with networks in England and Norway. A decade later, the Internet Protocol was enhanced with a set of communication protocols, the Transmission Control Program/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), that supported both local and wide-area networks. Shortly thereafter, the National Science Foundation (NSF) created the NSFnet to link five supercomputer centers, and this, coupled with TCP/IP, soon supplanted the ARPAnet as the backbone of the Internet. In 1995, however, the NSF decommissioned the NSFnet, and responsibility for the Internet was assumed by the private sector. Progress toward the privatization of the Internet continued when ICANN assumed oversight responsibility for the domain name system in 1998 under an agreement with the U.S. Dept. of Commerce. Fueled by the increasing popularity of personal computers, e-mail, and the World Wide Web (which was introduced in 1991 and saw explosive growth beginning in 1993), the Internet became a significant factor in the stock market and commerce during the second half of the decade. By 2000 it was estimated that the number of adults using the Internet exceeded 100 million in the United States alone. The increasing globalization of the Internet has led a number of nations to call for oversight and governance of the Internet to pass from the U.S. government and ICANN to an international body, but a 2005 international technology summit agreed to preserve the status quo while establishing an international forum for the discussion of Internet policy issues.
The noun internet has one meaning:
Meaning #1: a computer network consisting of a worldwide network of computer networks that use the TCP/IP network protocols to facilitate data transmission and exchange
Synonym: cyberspace