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The Internet is a public collaboration. No one person, organization, or group of
organizations owns it. As it grew from a small network of four computers used in research
for the United States defense establishment into a public system comprised of hundreds of
commercial telecommunication networks of all sizes, thousands of institutions, hundreds of
thousands of businesses, and millions of individual users.
How is it all kept together?
Several organizations each participate in maintaining some
kind of order to the Net. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is a group of working
members from many corporations and competent individuals that collaborate on maintaining
the TCP/IP and the underlying Internet protocol.
The Web's protocol inventor is Tim Berners-Lee who co-founded The World Wide Web
Consortium who foster the development of Hypertext Transport Protocol (HTTP) that your Web
browser and all Web servers use, plus Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), and other Web
standards. All the Net's addresses and domain names are controlled by an organization
called InterNIC.
The Internet continues to be influenced by governments around the world. Some governments
determine how accessible the Internet is and who can access it. Democratic goverments are
concerned about defense security, children's access to pornography, and the regulation of
and provision of fair access to telecommunications infrastructure. |
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