The Internet

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The Public Internet, which is commonly confused with the World Wide Web, a popular subset of it, is a vast, world-wide internetworking computer system using the TCP/IP protocols and various other standards circulated as documents referred to as RFC's or "Requests for Comment". The Public Internet should not be confused with private networks using internetworking protocols or with the concept of internetworking of networks in general.

The Internet grew out of DARPA experiments with internetworking and was heavily influenced by work at U.C. Berkley and the UNIX operating system, in particular the immensely influential "4.3 BSD" version of UNIX produced at Berkley's famous Computer Sciences Research Group, and its equally famous Net/2 tape.

The Internet was originally wholly non-commercial, being an academic project. After time, full commercialization commenced and it exploded from obscurity to become the dominant practice of computer networking.

The Internet is used as a medium for all manner of communications, including streaming media, textual information, speech, recordings and indeed every form of information presently known to man and possibly a few else besides.

The administrative trouble of managing the DNS system which maps understandable Domain names such as vistua.com to machine usable routing numbers called IP addresses has existed since commercialization began. Various inter-related agencies including IANA, The National Science Foundation, AT&T and the for-profit corporation Network Solutions administered DNS for some years until these roles were assumed by ICANN "The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers". The ICANN system is not without its detractors, including Vistua administration.

Misuse of public networking facilities dates to 1994 with the first known commercial spam being sent through Usenet (a forum-like distributed information system that predates the Web but exists to this very day) by the law firm of Canter and Siegel. This event shortly followed the NSF lifting the ban on commercial speech on The Internet and marked the end of the first era of The Internet. Spam continues to be a very serious problem to this day with approximately 98.% of email traffic being spam. Security problems with The Internet are a serious difficulty that only good administration and cautious users can tackle.

Categories: Internet

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