The internet is the infrastructure connecting over 20 billion devices across public and private networks worldwide. Although the term "internet" is commonly used to refer to where users browse sites, check email, and engage in other online activities, these services run atop this underlying infrastructure. Through these web services, the internet provides about three-quarters of the world's population with access to information, communication, entertainment, and platforms for commerce, healthcare, and banking.
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Resembling a roadway with traffic laws that all cars must follow, the internet is the hardware that connects a source to a destination, and these connections must follow specific software rules. Although data had to travel through about 10 networks to reach a destination in the past, data centers increasingly consolidate traffic, just as a highway does for cars, to improve data speeds.
When users create a website, they organize content and store it on a web server—one of various types of hardware that make up the internet—in web languages, such as HTML and JavaScript. When visiting the site, a web browser translates these languages into text and other media for consumption.
As of 2025, the four most populous nations—China, India, the US, and Indonesia—are also the ones with the most internet users, collectively accounting for almost half of the 6.04 billion internet users worldwide. This suggests that population size, rather than adoption rate, is a better predictor of online activity.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower established the Advanced Research Projects Agency in 1958, which recruited scientists to design the first large-scale computer network to support the American military during the Cold War. Academics would use the network to communicate via email among several US research universities.
The system consists of several layers—application, transport, internet, and network—each responsible for specific tasks. These include interacting with a web browser, checking for errors, sending packets of data across various networks to avoid congestion on their way to a destination address, and managing the transmission of information across hardware, such as an Ethernet cable.
DNS translates domain names, such as join1440.com, into numerical IP addresses, such as 192.0.2.1, which computer systems use to determine what content a user is looking for across the World Wide Web, making navigation easier for the vast majority of users. Web outages can occur if the DNS servers making these translations become inaccessible.
NSFNET was launched in 1986 by the National Science Foundation as the first network available to all researchers, connecting them to a system of supercomputer facilities. Despite growing from 2,000 computers in 1985 to 2 million by 1993, the rapid expansion of commercial internet services led to NSFNET's decommissioning by 1995.
Through an open, transparent, and collaborative model built on open standards development and shared global ownership, the internet is kept freely accessible amid evolving international policies. Key organizations, such as IANA, which allocates IP addresses and fulfills administrative functions for the Domain Name System, function as non-profit organizations.
About half this time consists of content from social media platforms, where the average user spends about 18.5 hours weekly. An estimated $3.66T was spent on consumer goods by online shoppers in 2025, though non-consumer goods, such as flights and hotel stays, greatly increase this estimate.
The Submarine Cable Map provides users with data from TeleGeography's Transport Networks Research Service on individual submarine cables, including cable owners, suppliers, URLs, landing points, lengths, and notes of interest.
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