What exactly IS THE INTERNET?

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What exactly is the internet?

Nobody runs or controls the internet per say.

The internet does not have an owner/maintainer.

Yet billions of billions of people are connected through...THE INTERNET

How can so much information, and billions of dollars just pass magically from one place to another...through a little wire 1/8in thick.

So if anyone has any ideas...

What exactly is THE INTERNET?
#off topic forum #internet
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    • hi i believe the INTERNET to be the high speed highway to knowledge and understanding. Where you research any subject at push of a button.
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  • Whoa! For me Internet is my source of unlimited information and money. Internet has been part of my life.
  • The internet is merely a network. It is differentiated from every other network in that each system somehow has a path to a common connection. All the major credit card processors, banks, and gateways are on that network, so moving money is easy. Each entity owns/maintains its part. BTW not all connections use the same path. That is why it is called a NETwork.

    BTW only about 3 billion(It is less than 4244635648, but I never bothered to figure the actual number.) entities can currently be reaced directly on the internet through IPs ONLY.

    Steve
  • Internet is a network composed of smaller networks. It begins & ends nowhere, it has no owner. It is the last, 100% free mass medium in the world.
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    • I would debate the 100% free part.
  • What exactly is the world?

    Nobody runs or controls the world per se.

    The world does not have an owner/maintainer.

    Yet billions of billions of people are connected through...THE WORLD

    How can so much information, and billions of dollars just pass magically from one place to another...through NOTHING.

    So if anyone has any ideas...

    What exactly is THE WORLD?

    WTF
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    • Disagreed. The world is controlled by many beaurocracies, governments, corporations, etc. They are all controlled by one person or a handful of people. And they are all controlled by the almighty dollar/Euro/Yen/Pound/Baht. Which really has no intrinsic value, but is only valued by what it represents. The world is certainly controlled. It is bought and sold acre by acre on the open market. Whether this is a good or bad thing, I'll leave that to the moralists and philosophers.

      To answer the original question, the internet is tubes that fascinate us all. The geniuses that manipulate these wires that are an 1/8 inch thick to transmit information are the real heroes in the story. Anyone can create a website, but very few people can create something of value from wires. In short, the internet is electronic awesomeness.
  • This is very comman question we use internet in daily life but never come to what is internet exactly ? From my point of view it is information and communication source which is connect through Hyper text transport protocol.
  • You'll find the answer here - Internet - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - it's not rocket science.

    ...and I totally agree it's 99% full of garbage!
  • I see the point you're trying to make Alexa... But....

    Newsgroups full of porn?

    Spam email?

    I'll stick to the 99%

    An nteresting "fact" I heard a few years back... The claim was that if you took the traffic of one day across the entire internet the amount of data transferred is more than the communications passed (including the written word, verbal communication, telephone, TV etc) through the entire history of the human race - say pre 1970.
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    • A popular misconception. The Internet is so vast it is beyond most people's comprehension. To say it's 99% crap demonstrates naiveté, even you, Alexa.

      To give an idea about the true size of the Internet, consider this. Google currently has approximately 50 billion web pages in their index. Those 50E9 pages do not even approach 5% of what is available on the 'Net. Got that?

      Back in 2005 Google CEO Eric Schmidt estimated the Internet at 5 million terabytes, of which, at that time, Google had indexed about 170 terabytes. The Internet's 2005 size would take 300 years to index. BTW, in 2005 Google's index was about 25 billion web pages...

      What so many don't realize is that search engines cannot and do not index databases and many other repositories, like universities and any resource that dynamically presents data. You can build a lucrative career specializing in the "deep Internet". Companies like LexisNexis - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia already make a fortune charging for making access easy.

      A very simple example. A while ago I was searching for public domain cookbooks. Books not in the Gutenberg Project. Following links away from Gutenberg I found myself at a university site, West Virginia, I think. Following more links I ended up in a library of scanned books from the 18th and 19th centuries. Lots of cookbooks.

      Lots of everything. Universities, of course, are all about information and have amazing stuff online that is not in any search engine. Plus links to other universities which link to others.... Artwork, history, technology, science. Just at universities. And they are just a start. Many companies have public access databases too. Don't forget FTP servers... On and on...

      Once you break out of the "Web is the Internet" mindset, the human universe opens up.

      EDIT: I just remembered a site I bookmarked ages ago. I stumbled on it looking for more online books. It gives a taste of what's out there, a small taste, but tantalizing...
      http://www.collegedegree.com/library...ound_the_world
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  • Ahhh the internetzzzz...

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  • Alexa - I think we are singing off the same hymn sheet here...

    Amuses me that the OP is an 'Successful Internet Marketer' who;

    a) Has to ask the question in the first place
    b) Posts it here rather than us Google or Wikipedia to answer it
  • 99% is meant as an illustrative - non-researched number. (and intended to carry some humour which appears to have been lost somewhere)

    Take this thread for instance a question asked by someone who should clearly know better, should have just Googled the question - makes it kind of pointless doesn't it
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  • Internet is about accessing each other computer/server which are connected to each other.
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    • Wow - such words of wisdom - thank you! I guess you didn't read any of the other posts before responding with this puerile and simplistic answer?
  • The Internet is a mega library on steroids - at least that's how I see it. Maybe it's because I am spend so much time at my local library while I'm creating information products - It's a nice way to be around others if you get bored working from home all the time...
  • I think we should combine the wisdom of three politicians to define the Internet for the OP:

    The Internets are a series of tubes invented by Al Gore.
  • Lol. A series of tubes huh?
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  • The internet isn't a series of tubes or networks, it comes in a black box and of course it doesn't weigh anything, here's a picture of the internet.


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