As of 2009, it was said that there were nearly 1.5 billion internet surfers throughout the world. The internet has been one of the most revolutionary and innovative inventions in recent years, and it has completely changed the way we live today by advancing technology and it’s capabilities even more as each year passes. The internet has advanced so much over the years that we could now exist completely from our own homes, effectively never having to leave the house. We can shop for clothes, groceries and electronics, we can search for jobs and even work from home, the Internet has opened thousands of doors for new businesses all over the world and will continue to do so for years to come.

What is the Internet?

The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use what is known as ‘the standard Internet Protocol Suite’ (or TCP/IP) to serve billions of users all over the world. 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 and optical networking technologies. The Internet carries a vast array of information resources and services, most notably the inter-linked hypertext documents of the World Wide Web (WWW) and the infrastructure to support electronic mail. Most traditional communications media, such as telephone and television services, are reshaped or redefined using the technologies of the Internet, giving rise to services such as Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and IPTV. Newspaper publishing has been reshaped into Web sites, blogging, and web feeds. The Internet has enabled or accelerated the creation of new forms of human interactions through instant messaging, Internet forums, and social networking sites.

History of the Internet

The origins of the Internet reach back to the 1960s when the United States funded research projects of its military agencies to build robust, fault-tolerant and distributed computer networks. This research and a period of civilian funding of a new U.S backbone by the National Science Foundation spawned worldwide participation in the development of new networking technologies and led to the commercialization of an international network in the mid 1990s, and resulted in the following popularization of countless applications in virtually every aspect of modern human life. As of 2009, an estimated quarter of Earth’s population uses the services of the Internet.

The Internet has no centralized governance in either technological implementation or policies for access and usage; each constituent network sets its own standards. Only the overreaching definitions of the two principal name spaces in the Internet, the Internet Protocol address space and the Domain Name System, are directed by a maintainer organization, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. The technical underpinning and standardization of the core protocols is an activity of the Internet Engineering Task Force, a non-profit organization of loosely affiliated international participants that anyone may associate with by contributing technical expertise.

Internet Users Worldwide

Nowadays, the Internet is a worldwide phenomenon, with millions of users within each country in the world. The top 15 worldwide estimated statistics for internet browsing and surfing currently stand at:

1. China – with 179.7 million

2. The United States – with 163.3 million

3. Japan – with 60.0 million

4. Germany – with 37.0 million

5. The UK – with 36.7 million

6. France – with 34.0 million

7. India – with 32.1 million

8. Russia – with 29.0 million

9. Brazil – with 27.7 million

10. South Korea – with 27.3 million

11. Canada – with 21.8 million

12. Italy – with 20.8 million

13. Spain – with 17.9 million

14. Mexico – with 12.5 million

15. Netherlands – with 11.8 million