A visualization of Internet connections. Wikimedia Commons.
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The Internet is not a single machine or organisation but an interconnected system of networks communicating through shared protocols. Its ancestry includes ARPANET, a US research network that began operating in 1969. During the 1970s, Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn developed core ideas behind TCP/IP, protocols designed to let different networks exchange data. ARPANET adopted TCP/IP in 1983, a milestone in the emergence of the modern Internet. The World Wide Web, created later by Tim Berners-Lee, is a service that operates on Internet infrastructure rather than a synonym for the Internet itself. What began as specialised research networking became a global communications environment, raising persistent questions about governance, privacy, security, inequality and control of infrastructure.
