Web & Internet Definition

Last update : July 23, 2013

On October 24, 1995, the Federal Networking Council (FNC) unanimously passed a resolution defining the term Internet. This Internet Definition was developed in consultation with the leadership of the Internet and Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) Communities.

Internet refers to the global information system that :

  1. is logically linked together by a globally unique address space based on the Internet Protocol (IP) or its subsequent extensions/follow-ons
  2. is able to support communications using the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) suite or its subsequent extensions/follow-ons, and/or other IP-compatible protocols
  3. provides, uses or makes accessible, either publicly or privately, high level services layered on the communications and related infrastructure described herein

Today, Wikipedia gives the following Internet Definition : The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to serve several billion users worldwide.. Thus, the Internet is a network of networks, defined by the TPC/IP standards.

The Web is defined in W3C’s Architecture of the World Wide Web, Volume I, as follows: The World Wide Web (WWW, or simply Web) is an information space in which the items of interest, referred to as resources, are identified by global identifiers called Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI). Thus, the Web is an information space. The first three specifications for Web technologies defined URLs, HTTP, and HTML. They have been written by Tim Berners-Lee.