What Is The Internet

CS73N Note on What Is The Internet

Started as a new top-level page 13May2006, updated 11 April 2007, 12 Jan. 2008 by Gio. Supplemental readings added by Sgt 11Apr07

We can no longer cover the Internet as a distinct entity. It is not just a bunch of interconnected computers. Some people see it now as a social experiment, but it was never intended as such, although the Internet has pervaded all aspects of society.

Whereas some authors see the glass as being half empty: only 70% of the U.S. population in 2006 has access to the internet, and only 35% has  access via Broadband,  it is actually an amazingly filled glass, given that the technology for  Internet use was restricted to military and university users up to about 1990.

For comparison, electricity, available to the public around 1880 was not available to 50% of the U.S. population until around 1910 <get the correct date>.  In the US, it took Radio 38 years (from 1924 to 1962) to reach 50M customers. TV, starting in 1954 took 13 years;  Cable TV distribution, starting around 1978 took 10 years; and the Internet, starting in 1995, took 5 years to reach 50M customers. These numbers, however, are not adjusted for the growth in population (see How to Lie With Statistics) [Morgan Stanley Dean Witter Technology Research, 2000].

Worldwide, the spread of Internet access is even more amazing.  <Hypothesis: The number of people having access to the Internet in 2006 is approaching the number of people having electricity. >

[Notes from Goetz Grafe, HP, CS545 seminar, 11Jan 2008:]By 2007 there were 0.5B servers on the Internet with assigned IP addresses With laptops and Internet enabled phones, using transient addresses, another 1.5B devices are on the Internet at any time.  Voice transmission over the Internet is increasing rapidly since the bandwidth has become sufficient for understandability. Compares this number to 3.6B telephone terminations now. The rate of growth is especially rapid in areas having poor traditional services.

The next problem is that the world is running out of IP addresses (now encoded in 32bits≈ 2³²-1= 8B) by 2010. Incremental conversion to ipv6 (using 256bits) is too slow, since it is not yet insisted on by useers (as Google.)

CS73N material dealing with the Internet is

Note on Internet Technologies and Growth.

Note on Internet Top Level Domain Names

http://www-db.stanford.edu/pub/gio/CS99I/internet.html  old cs99 material, back to 1993.

http://www-db.stanford.edu/pub/gio/CS99I/deepweb/deepweb.html  article on the `Deep Web', material not accessible by browsers, January 2002..

Note on Internet Long Tail : Opportunities which arise from the unlimited access provided by the Internet.

Other readings and resources:

The Internet Society's All About the Internet 

CNRI's Infrastructure History Series: Abstracts online, complete texts in Green Library for Energy, Telephones/Telegraphs, and Railroads.