Today, the term Internet most commonly refers to the global system of interconnected computer networks, though it may also refer to any group of smaller networks.

The word Internet was used in 1974 as the shorthand form of Internetwork. The word internetted was used as early as 1849, meaning interconnected or interwoven. The Internet Messenger by Buky Schwartz, located in Holon, Israel In November 2006, the Internet was included on USA Today 's list of New Seven Wonders. The technical underpinning and standardization of the core protocols is an activity of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), a non-profit organization of loosely affiliated international participants that anyone may associate with by contributing technical expertise. The overreaching definitions of the two principal name spaces in the Internet, the Internet Protocol address (IP address) space and the Domain Name System (DNS), are directed by a maintainer organization, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). The Internet has no single centralized governance in either technological implementation or policies for access and usage each constituent network sets its own policies. Business-to-business and financial services on the Internet affect supply chains across entire industries. Online shopping has grown exponentially for major retailers, small businesses, and entrepreneurs, as it enables firms to extend their ' brick and mortar' presence to serve a larger market or even sell goods and services entirely online.

The Internet has enabled and accelerated new forms of personal interactions through instant messaging, Internet forums, and social networking services.

Newspaper, book, and other print publishing are adapting to website technology, or are reshaped into blogging, web feeds and online news aggregators. Most traditional communication media, including telephone, radio, television, paper mail and newspapers are reshaped, redefined, or even bypassed by the Internet, giving birth to new services such as email, Internet telephone, Internet television, online music, digital newspapers, and video streaming websites. Although the Internet was widely used by academia in the 1980s, commercialization incorporated its services and technologies into virtually every aspect of modern life. The linking of commercial networks and enterprises by the early 1990s marked the beginning of the transition to the modern Internet, and generated a sustained exponential growth as generations of institutional, personal, and mobile computers were connected to the network. The funding of the National Science Foundation Network as a new backbone in the 1980s, as well as private funding for other commercial extensions, led to worldwide participation in the development of new networking technologies, and the merger of many networks. The primary precursor network, the ARPANET, initially served as a backbone for interconnection of regional academic and military networks in the 1970s. The origins of the Internet date back to the development of packet switching and research commissioned by the United States Department of Defense in the 1960s to enable time-sharing of computers. The Internet carries a vast range of information resources and services, such as the inter-linked hypertext documents and applications of the World Wide Web (WWW), electronic mail, telephony, and file sharing. It is a network of networks that consists of private, public, academic, business, and government networks of local to global scope, linked by a broad array of electronic, wireless, and optical networking technologies. The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices.

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