What is the Internet?

Networks of Networks

The internet is one of those things that we just assume we know what it is. We just talk about it and we use it so much. But what really is the internet, and how does it work?

The way things started is we just wanted to have a few computers that were connected together, and so we connected them with some sort of hub. Then we wanted to get networks connected together, so we created these routers so we could route between these networks. What ends up happening is that these networks got bigger and bigger.

Then you'd start having companies that'd say, well, I'll help you interconnect your network to maybe another site's network that you have over here. So you had a company that would set up in an area and start creating all of these networks of networks. That's essentially what the internet is — these networks of networks.

You'd have another company that would set up over here, and they would have all of their connections all set up. These are all routers, and they'd all be interconnected. Then you have another company that's over here, and that would set up.

What these companies started getting together and doing is saying, well, we could actually better serve any of our customers that are connected here if we interconnected our different companies together. And there's redundancy in here — that's why I'm drawing multiple lines here. But now we have companies that are interconnecting, that are providing these network services, that are connecting to other companies. And then those companies start connecting to other companies. Pretty soon you have this whole global network of networks that are set up that can deliver these services. So now you have the forming of what is now the internet.

No One Owns the Internet

The internet is no one company. The internet is not just somebody that's masterminding all of this. There's no one entity that knows and can map out all of the internet and what exactly the internet looks like, because these individual companies are in charge of their own network. It's constantly changing, and there are things that are very dynamic, and there's information that needs to be passed between all of these different companies.

That's why we represent the internet as a cloud in many of our drawings: because, number one, it's so massively huge, and, number two, no one really knows what all of the internet actually is and looks like, and all the ins and outs of everything about the internet. So we just represent it as this mass, this cloud, and when you're connecting into the internet, you're connecting into the cloud.

The Physical Connections

Not only do we have all of these companies that are connecting all of these different countries together, but some of these companies were willing to also lay down cable down in the bottom of the ocean — fiber optic cable — and lay this down to interconnect these companies to create this global network. And so we have communication.

We also use satellites. There are these big dishes that beam up into space and hit these satellites up in space. Now, it's a little bit slower of a technology, because it's got to go to space.

So there's all of this communication that's happening that interconnects all of these different networks together, which is really quite amazing, because we could be anywhere in the world. Let's say we're in South America down here, and we could be connecting to servers over in Asia. Or we could be in Africa connecting to something in Australia or Europe or North America. So we could be connecting to any of these machines.

We just set up a machine and we put an IP address on this machine. We install the services that we want to run, and then people are able to connect to that from clear across this world. So essentially that's the internet, and how the internet was formed and created, and now we have this network of networks that allows us to communicate across this planet.