The Beginning of the "Network of Networks"

The first network of computers was built by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the U.S. Department of Defense in 1969. It was called the ARPA Network or ARPANET in short.

Initially, the ARPANET was a small network and serving only a handful of users because it consisted of only four primary host computers that were giving the services of file transfers, communications, and access to the network’s high-speed data lines. A host computer acts as a network server, providing services to other computers that are connected to it. ARPA Network or the 'ARPANET' was a packet-switching network and the first network to implement the TCP/IP protocol suite, the two main networking technologies that became the technical foundation of the Internet. The system grew quickly and spread widely as the number of hosts grew. The network jumped across the Atlantic to Europe in 1973.

In the mid-1980s, the US Defense Department stopped funding the ARPANET and another US Federal agency named the National Science Foundation (NSF) joined the project. NSF established five “super computing centers” that were available to anyone who wanted to use them for academic research purposes. The users were expected to access these super computers through the ARPA Network but the existing ARPA network could not handle the load. Therefore, the National Science Foundation created a new, higher-capacity network, called the NSFNET. The link between the ARPANET and the NSFNET was first called the Internet.

NSFNET made Internet connections widely available for academic researchers but did not permit the users to conduct private business over this system. Therefore, several other private telecommunication companies built their own network backbones that used the same set of networking protocols as NSFNET.  A network backbone is a central structure that connects other elements of the network like a tree's trunk or an animal's spine. These private portions of the Internet were not limited by NSFNET's "appropriate use" restrictions, so it became possible to use the Internet for distributing business and commercial information. The commercialization of the internet incorporated its services and technologies into virtually every aspect of modern life.

Initially, the ARPANET served as a backbone for the interconnection of many regional academic and military networks in the 1980s but the original ARPANET was shut down in 1990. After that, the National Science Foundation Network appeared as a new backbone in 1985 but the US government funding for the NSFNET was also discontinued in 1995. The commercial Internet backbone services have had replaced them by them because, in the early 1990s, the interest in Internet technology began to expand dramatically. The private funding for commercial backbones in the 1990s led to worldwide participation in the development of new internet, web, and networking technologies. The merger of many networks and the linking of commercial networks and enterprises marked the beginning of the transition to the modern Internet.

Who owns the internet? 

The answer to this question may surprise you that the Internet, which is the world’s largest network of networks, is a huge cooperative community with no central ownership. No single person or a group controls or can control the whole entire network and there is not a central governing authority that may force the technological implementations or policies for its access and use because each constituent network may have its own policies for this purpose. However, several organizations exist there providing the guidelines for the technological implementations in this regard, but they also (almost) universally support the openness of the internet and a lack of centralized control.

“The Internet Society” and the “World Wide Web Consortium”

These two organizations propose the standards for Internet technologies and provide guidelines for their appropriate use. The World-Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is headed by Tim Berners-Lee at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and influencing and controlling to a large degree how technologies are deployed on the Web and internet. The W3C specifies HTML and XML, but other bodies, such as the European Computer Manufacturers Association (ECMA), have standardized other Web technologies, such as what we mostly call JavaScript. JavaScript is a programming language originally developed by Netscape...

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) 

This organization is responsible for the procedures and maintenance of several databases related to the namespaces, the Domain Name System (DNS), and the numerical spaces, the Internet Protocol addresses (IP addresses) on the Internet which ensures the network's stability and security operations.

Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). 

It is another non-profit organization of loosely affiliated international participants who do the activity of technical underpinning and standardization for the core protocols. Anyone may associate with them by contributing technical expertise.

How many people use the internet? 

The openness of the internet has attracted millions of users across the globe and its access was available to nearly one half billion people worldwide in 2001. The number continues to climb dramatically and today, it has reached 4.6 billion people.