What is the Internet?

Wikipedia, the internet’s definitive resource for information and definitions describes the internet as:

“…a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to serve billions of users worldwide. 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, wireless and optical networking technologies. The Internet carries an extensive range of information resources and services, such as the inter-linked hypertext documents of the World Wide Web (WWW) and the infrastructure to support email.”

What this really means is, groups of computers all over the world that work together to allow us to use our computers as a communication tool.  The groups of computers lay the groundwork, the protocol, for our computers to be able to go online, surf the net and send emails.

Because the internet is made up of many groups of computers, or a web of computers, it is not critical to the greater system if one group experiences difficulties ie: loss of power.  Only the section of computers relying on that group will be affected, the rest will never know that power is out somewhere else in the world.