What is Internet? Who Created it? Who Regulates it?

Reading news, getting notes for your next exam, talking to your friends and relatives, booking tickets etc. Are few of the many tasks which have been made quick and easy by none other than internet. The other uses of Internet includes; socializing, digital marketing, dating, online shopping, communication, exchanging emails, research work, playing games, education, self improvement etc.
According to dictionary definition of internet, “an internet is a global computer network providing a variety of information and Communication facilities consisting of interconnected networks using standardized Communication protocols”. The internet carries a huge range of data, information resources and services. If we will study a bit about internet’s history we will get to know that it was not developed within a few days a few months. 
It was started by the American department of defence (DOD) in 1969. DOD started a network of device called APRANET (Advanced Research Projects Administration Network) with one computer in California and three computers in Utah. In September 1969, five universities namely; the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), the Stanford Research institute (SRI), the University of California, Santa Barbara (USCB) and the University of Utah were connected by the network called APRANET. The use of internet gradually increased and other universities private and commercial organisations and research organisations also started using internet. After that internet expanded to Europe and Australia in mid to late 1980s and to Asia in late 1980s and early 1990s. This gave rise to the uses of internet.
The primary purpose of internet is to facilitate the information sharing. The basic concept of internet includes; browser, hypertext and hypermedia. HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), URL (Uniform Resource Locator). HTTP (Hypertext Transport Protocol), homepage and clients and servers.
Browser is that software on your computer which allows you to access the world wide web (WWW). Hypertext is that text which contains electronic links to other text. HTML is used to create world wide web documents by a set of commands. URL is the address of the links to another document or item. Protocol that is used to transfer hypertext or hypermedia documents is called HTTP. Home page is the first page or the starting point for locating information at world wide web site. Client is a web browser installed in a computer and server is a host computer that is capable of providing information to others.
Have you ever thought, how every information is easily and ready available on internet at just few clicks? collecting the data, filtering the data and uploading the data to make each and every information available to the whole world requires a lot of efforts and hard work. Just like every coin has two sides internet also has the risk of the misuse of the data and hence, the content available on the internet needs to be regulated. Now the question is who regulate the internet? Let’s try to answer this question.
Regulating the content on internet is something about which both Government and users are concerned about. Federal Communications Commission (FCC), focus on ensuring that every individual has access to the broadband infrastructure and made sure that internet service providers should neither provide any unlawful content not block any lawful content. Few of the concerns which gave rise to internet regulations are; unauthorised communication of personal data, pornography, malicious hacking, content on racial discrimination, instructions on pirating credit cards etc.
Different countries have different ways of regulating the internet based upon their concerns. Few of them are mentioned below.
United States of America has most of educated regulations for the internet. USA laws has such broad definition that even without amendments, the internet can be captured. A user in USA can go to jail for transmitting and receiving pornography.
Singapore, has adopted a multipronged approach to internet censorship. it has started giving class licence for certain classes of content. These content are dememed to be automatically licensed provided a code of practice is abided by.
Germany, has censored pornography and anti-semitic propaganda in recently drafted “multimedia law”.
South Korea, is the first country to have any internet specific censorship law. This log gives right to “Minister of Communication” to order any information provider to restrict and to delete the data or any material. An article on “How countries are regulating internet content”, states that, ‘according to a nonprofit activist group at least one person has been denied access to the internet under South Korea’s National Security Law to prevent unwanted contacts’.
Now, an organisation called Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers’ (ICANN) which regulates the internet. The responsibility of ICANN is assigning numerical internet addresses to websites and computers and translating them into the normal web addresses that people type into the browsers. To avoid any kind of calamity ICANN selected seven people to be keyholders and give each one an actual key to internet. Apart from those seven keyholders there are seven more people who work as backup keyholders which makes fourteen people in all.
Let us now study about domain and hosting. Domain name is the name of your website. It is that address where internet users can access your website. Purpose of domain name is to find and identify computers on the internet. It is a combination of various letters and. domain name can be used in combination of various domain name extensions such as .net, .com, .org etc. Each and every domain name is unique that is no two websites can have same domain name. For example if the domain name of your website is www.examplename.com, then it will take the person to your website only and the domain name of your website is “examplename”. This name has to be registered before you start using it.
Web hosting is a service which allows individuals and organisations to make their website accessible via the world wide web. There are various types of web hosting services. Let us list them below:
1) Shared web hosting service
2) Reseller web hosting
3) Virtual dedicated server
4) Dedicated hosting service
5) Managed hosting service
6) Colocation web hosting service
7) Cloud hosting
8) Clustered hosting
9) Grid hosting
10) Home server.
In shared web hosting service many websites reside on one web server connected to the internet. It is the most economical option for hosting as the overall cost of server maintenance is divided over many customers.
titu
Delhi Magazine Team

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