How Does It Work: The Internet

The Internet. We ALL know what it is. We're on it right now actually. You use it to search for stuff you might not know yourself. You use it to buy whatever you want at any hour and have it delivered directly to  your front door. You use it to play games with people half way around the world. You even use it to talk to friends or make friends. Hell, statistics show 1 in 5 couples now even met online. But have you ever stopped to think what exactly you just did? Did you ever try and contemplate what the Internet even is? I'm almost sure you haven't.

The Internet can best be described as a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to serve billions of users world wide. (found using the define: function, Google)

Okay. Pause.

What on earth does that mean? Let me borrow a super common Internet phrase. Basically, you could think of the Internet as a series of tubes. Now, think of each computer having one tube that connects to a main tube. Now picture this main tube going down every road, passing virtually every home in the world. That's just about the magnitude of the Internet.



Try to use this as your tubes. Let each individual tube be the tube to your computer and each collection of tubes be one main tube.



(If my tube explanation doesn't help you, and you're more of a literal person, check this article by Discovery here.)



Homeland Security's Emblem

These 'tubes' are publicly owned. Well, technically their publicly shared. So, they're not owned at all. And when you think about it, that's probably one of the best things about it. It's a publicly shared network controlled by the people who use it. It is, however, monitored by higher powers such as The Internet Society, a nonprofit organization created in 1992 to overlook how Internet protocol is created and how we use the Internet to interact, and Law Enforcement agencies like Cyber Patrol or even Homeland Security.

So, just a quick recap. The Internet is a series of publicly shared tubes which connect to main tubes eventually connecting your tube to the tube of every computer in the world. Sound complicated? It shouldn't. If it does, then you probably wouldn't be able to fathom how complicated the actual Internet is. Now, I could spit out a bunch of acronyms and complex terms but that's not my job here. My job is to make complicated tech simple, and bring it to people like you. For a more in depth look at how the internet functions, check out Discovery Channel's How Stuff Works here or The Internet Society's pages about the Internet here.