The Internet
What is the Internet?
The internet is a specific collection of networks that are interconnected.
These networks span more than 40 countries.
Internet Addressing and Access
A user ID and access connection is necessary to gain access to the internet. The access connections are issued by national, regional, and local providers.
Every node on the Internet has a unique address called its internet
number or IP address. Addresses are
32 bits long and are usually written as 4 separate numbers delineated
by a period.
Internet Naming Conventions
Most people don't want to remember the IP address. So, a naming convention is used to identified computers. That standard is a user name followed by a node name. The node name includes a computer's name followed by a domain name. Some popular domain names are COM, EDU and COM. The general form is:
user@computer.domain
The @ symbol is used to denote the node name and the period is
used as a separator and to specify domain names. A table or dictionary
maps the name to the IP address. An address can have multiple
names.
Who Owns and Controls the Internet?
The Internet is not a centrally-administered or centrally-owned entity, although there are organizations that establish and maintain standards for communications protocols. The main backbone of the United State's portions of the Internet had been maintained by the National Science Foundation (NSF), but is in the process of being handed off to private companies. Branching off from that backbone are a multitude of independently administered regional networks. Many of these regional networks originally evolved as isolated hubs of computer communications, but have since linked up to the big Internet.
The various regional networks that comprise the Internet organize connections amongst themselves, deciding who to link to and how much to charge for the links. For example, Idaho State University (ISU) belongs to a regional network called Westnet that also contains several other schools from Arizona, New Mexico, Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, and Idaho (the University of Idaho in Moscow, however, belongs to a different network, NorthWestNet ).
It is generally the responsibility of organizations that attach
to the Internet (like ISU) to pay for their link in the network
and to provide the communications equipment necessary to talk
with the rest of the world. When such a link is added to the Internet,
it is generally understood that some traffic over the link might
not be at all related to the organization that provided the link--the
new link becomes part of the overall web of communications. The
actual data transmission itself typically takes place over special
digital communication lines rented or leased from a telephone
company.