What is the Internet?

[Closed captioning: What Is the Internet? ] [Music] What is the internet? The internet is like a popular thing.

Some satellites up there. I picture it in my head with like waves of internet going to the phone. Somebody told me a cloud once.

The internet is a lot like  plumbing. It’s always moving. Most people don’t have any idea where the  internet came from, and it doesn’t matter, they don’t need to.

It’s sort of like asking who  invented the ballpoint pen, or the flush toilet, or, you know, the zipper. These are all things we  just use every day. We don’t even think about the fact that one day, somebody invented them.

So, the internet is just like that. Many, many years ago, in the early 1970s, my  partner Bob Kahn and I began working on the design of what we now call the internet. It was a result of another experiment called the ARPANET, which stood for Advanced  Research Projects Agency Network.

It was a Defense Department research project. Paul Baran was trying to figure out how to build a communication system that  might actually survive a nuclear attack. So he had this idea of breaking messages up into  blocks and sending them as fast as possible in every possible direction through the mesh network.

So we built what eventually became a nationwide experimental packet network, and it worked! [Loud, electronic music] Is anybody in charge of the internet? The government controls it.

Elves. Obviously elves! The people who control the Wi-Fi because then no Wi-Fi, no internet.

T-Mobile, um, Xfinity. Bill Gates. Bill Gates.

Bill Gates. [pause] Right? The honest answer is well nobody, and maybe another answer is everybody.

The real answer is that the internet is made up of an incredibly large number  of independently operated networks. What’s interesting about the system is that it’s  fully distributed. There’s no central control that’s deciding how packets are routed  or where pieces of network are built, or even who interconnects with whom.

These are all business decisions that are made independently by the operators. They are all motivated to assure that there is end-to-end connectivity of every part of the  network, because the utility of the net is that any device can communicate with any other device,  just like you want to be able to make phone calls to any other telephone in the world. There’s nothing like this that has ever been built before.

The idea that what you know might be useful to somebody else or vice  versa is a very powerful motivator for sharing information. By the way that's how  science gets done, people share information. So, this is an opportunity for people to think up  new applications, maybe program them as apps on a mobile phone, maybe become part of the continued  growth of the infrastructure of the network to bring it to people who don’t have access to it  yet, or just make use of it on a day-to-day basis.

You can’t escape from contact with the  internet, so why not get to know it and use it?