The
Internet is a global system of interconnected
computer networks that use the standard
Internet protocol suite (often called TCP/IP, although not all applications use TCP) 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 an extensive range of information resources and services, such as the inter-linked
hypertext documents of the
World Wide Web (WWW) and the
infrastructureto support email.
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 2011, more than 2.2 billion people – nearly a third of
Earth's population — use the services of the Internet.
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