The Internet is a standardized, global system of interconnected computer networks that connects millions of people. The system uses the Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP) standard rules for data representation, signaling, authentication, and error detection. It is a network of networks that consists of millions of private and public, academic, business, and government networks of local to global scope that are linked by copper wires, fiber-optic cables, wireless connections, and other technologies.

The Internet carries a vast array of information resources and services, most notably the inter-linked hypertext documents of the World Wide Web (WWW) and the infrastructure to support electronic mail, in addition to popular services such as video on demand, online shopping, online gaming, exchange of information from one-to-many or many-to-many by online chat, online social networking, online publishing, file transfer, file sharing and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) or teleconferencing, telepresence person-to-person communication via voice and video. The origins of the Internet reach back to the 1960s when the United States funded research projects of its military agencies to build robust, fault-tolerant and distributed computer networks. This research and a period of civilian funding of a new U.S. backbone by the National Science Foundation spawned worldwide participation in the development of new networking technologies and led to the commercialization of an international network in the mid 1990s, and resulted in the following popularization of countless applications in virtually every aspect of modern human life.

As of 2009, an estimated quarter of Earth's population uses the services of the Internet. The terms Internet and World Wide Web are often used in everyday speech without much distinction. However, the Internet and the World Wide Web are not one and the same.

The Internet is a global data communications system. It is a hardware and software infrastructure that provides connectivity between computers. In contrast, the Web is one of the services communicated via the Internet.

It is a collection of interconnected documents and other resources, linked by hyperlinks and URLs. The term the Internet, when referring to the Internet, has traditionally been treated as a proper noun and written with an initial capital letter. There is a trend to regard it as a generic term or common noun and thus write it as "the internet", without the capital.

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