What is internet

 

What is the Internet ?

The internet is the wider network that allows

computer networks around the world run by companies, governments, universities and other organisations to talk to one another. The result is a mass of cables, computers, data centres, routers, servers, repeaters, satellites and wifi towers that allows digital information to travel around the world.

It is that infrastructure that lets you order the weekly shop, share your life on Facebook, stream Outcast on Netflix, email your aunt in Wollongong and search the web for the world’s tiniest cat.

What is the world wide web?

The web is a way to view and share information over the internet. That information, be it text, music, photos or videos or whatever, is written on web pages served up by a web browser.

Google handles more than 40,000 searches per second, and has 60% of the global browser market through Chrome. There are nearly 2bn websites in existence but most are hardly visited. The top 0.1% of websites (roughly 5m) attract more than half of the world’s web traffic.

Among them are Google, YouTube, Facebook, the Chinese site Baidu, Instagram, Yahoo, Twitter, the Russian social network VK.com, Wikipedia, Amazon and a smattering of porn sites. The rise of apps means that for many people, being on the internet today is less about browsing the open web than getting more focused information: news, messages, weather forecasts, videos and their 

How much energy does the internet use?

The Chinese telecoms firm Huawei estimates that the information and communications technology (ICT) industry could use 20% of the world’s electricity and release more than 5% of the world’s carbon emissions by 2025. The study’s author, Anders Andrae, said the coming “tsunami of data” was to blame.

In 2016, the US government’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory estimated that American data centres – facilities where computers store, process and share information – might need 73bn kWh of energy in 2020. That’s the output of 10 Hinkley Point B nuclear power stations.