The Internet has totally revolutionised global communications. It is the largest computer network in the world, a huge public information highway. The Internet was created by the U.S. military in the late 1960’s as a way of enabling government researchers who were working on military projects to share computer files. The Internet then was largely an academic communications link. Government, industry and academia worked together to develop the Internet.

In 1962 Paul Barn of the RAND Corporation ( a U.S. government agency) was commissioned by the U.S. air force to do military research on maintaning a command network after a nuclear attack. His final proposal was a packet switched network. Packet switching is the breaking down of data into packets that are labelled to indicate the origin and destination of data from one computer to another.

In 1968 ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) awarded the ARPANET contract to BBN. they used a Honeywell minicomputer as the base on which they would build the switch. In 1969 they linked four computers.

In 1972 Ray Tomlinson of BBN created the first e-mail programme. ARPANET was using the Network Control Protocol or NCP to transfer data. This enabled communications between hosts running on the same network.

1973 saw the development of the protocol we now know as TCP/IP by a group headed by Vinton Cerf from Stanford and Bob Kahn from DARPA formerly known as ARPA. TCP/IP allowed diverse computer networks to communicate with each other. They also first used the word Internet in 1974.

From 1976 to 1983 many developments took place, the Ethernet allowed coaxial cable to move data extremely fast. SATNET linked the U.S. to Europe, at the same time the Department of Defence started to use the TCP/IP protocol. The first news group network was developed and IBM created BITNET (Because its Time Network). It was used for e-mail and listservs. Vinton Cerf connected a network between CSNET (the National Science Foundation creation) and ARPANET and in 1983 every machine connected to ARPANET had to use TCP/IP protocol thus making it the core Internet protocol. The University of Wisconsin created Domain Name System (DNS). This allowed packets to be directed to a domain name that would be translated by the server database into the corresponding IP number.

The next decade or so saw huge advancements in the development of the Internet. The ARPANET was divided into two networks MILNET (for the military) and ARPANET. The Internet Engineering Task Force IETF was created as a forum for technical coordination. Upon the completion of the TI NSFNET backbone (developed by the National Science Foundation) traffic increased so quickly that plans immediately began on upgrading the network again and a non profit making corporation called ANS (Advanced Network and Services) was formed. The Department of Defence disbanded the ARPANET and it was replaced by the NSFNET backbone. In 1990 Tim Berners-Lee and CERN developed a hypertext system to provide efficient information access to the members of the international physics community.

In 1991 the NSF established a new network called NREN, its purpose was to conduct high speed networking research. The Internet Society and the World Wide Web appeared in 1992. 1993 sees the development of a graphical user interface to the World Wide Web. Many new networks were added in 1994; in fact hundreds of thousands of new hosts were added to the Internet at this time. To date the Internet continues to grow and develop rapidly providing a means of communicating to all parts of the world. From its beginnings in 1969 the Internet has grown from four host computers to tens of millions.

The Internet Society (formed in 1992) oversees the policies and protocols that define how we use the Internet. Every computer that is connected to the Internet is part of a network. Connecting to an Internet Service Provider means that you are part of a network. The Internet is a network of networks all agreeing to intercommunicate with each other. A router determines where to send information from one computer to another. Routers are specialised computers that send your messages along a specific pathway, as the Internet is one huge network made up of tens of thousands of smaller networks, its use of routers is essential. A router directs the data to a unique identifying number called an IP address. IP stands for Internet Protocol, which is the language computers use to communicate with each other, IP addresses are normally expressed in decimal format, as it is easier for humans to understand, computers communicate in binary form. The four numbers in an IP address are called octets because they each have eight positions when viewed in binary form. The octets are used to create classes of IP addresses that can be assigned to a particular business; government or entity based on size or need. The octets are split into two sections Net and Host. The net section comes first and identifies the network that the computer belongs to; the Host identifies the actual computer on the network.

As more and more computers came online the IP address system became unwieldy and in 1983 the University of Wisconsin created the Domain Name System (DNS) which maps text names to IP addresses. When you use the Web or send an e-mail message a domain name is used. Every time you use a domain name you use the Internet’s DNS servers to translate the domain name into the IP address.

In theory nobody owns the actual Internet however the infrastructure on which the network runs is owned by a number of powerful corporations who can use the Internet to their advantage in business dealings. They almost certainly reduce customer choice. For example a relatively small number of companies own and operate the fibre and cables that form the Internets’ infrastructure. Large Internet service providers such as America Online has millions of Internet subscribers, companies supplying the infrastructure to such a company obviously offer AOL a better deal than they would provide to a smaller company. Major telecommunications companies have a huge advantage over their smaller rivals. There are dominant players on the Internet, if they raise their prices on peering for example, which would have immediate consequences on other companies. There is no doubt that large Internet infrastructure providers have taken advantage of their size in many ways, however many executives and academics that deal with the Internet on a day to day basis agree that no big player has so much power that it can shut down competition.

Many of the same issues apply when it comes to the question of who runs the Internet. While it is true that there is no central Internet authority, there are numerous committees, businesses and government agencies that exert very real control over how the Internet is run. Some of these include technical organisations such as the Internet Society, Internet Engineering Task Force, Internet Engineering Group and the Internet Task Force. Higher Education groups such as Universities and Colleges have a huge input. A number of government agencies still have a hand in decision-making regarding the Internet. The U.S. government still provides funding for Internet research. A wide range of private companies including telecommunications, Internet Service Providers, Cabling companies and many others combine to make an impact on the Internet.

However, Industry, Analysts and executives of such dominant companies contend that the market is so highly competitive that in effect it is self correcting, they deal in the market daily and their companies all have to work together and when it comes to establishing Internet standards they all have a voice. Finally, Leonard Kleinrock, who played a central role in establishing data networking technology says: "The network is so flexible, and it’s such an open network in terms of competition and architecture that if anyone began to flex some power, someone else would step in to compete with them"