Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Internet is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite, TCP/IP, to communicate between networks and devices. It links private, public, academic, business, and government networks of local to global scope. It carries services such as the World Wide Web, electronic mail, streaming media, and file sharing.
ARPANET, a forerunner of the Internet, began on the 29th of October 1969 with two nodes connecting the University of California, Los Angeles and the Stanford Research Institute. The Internet Protocol Suite was standardized in 1982, and by 1995 the Internet was fully commercialized in the United States when the NSFNet was decommissioned.
The Internet's core protocols grew from work by Vint Cerf at Stanford University and Bob Kahn at DARPA, who in 1974 published a proposal for a protocol for packet network intercommunication. Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web, building the first web browser, HTTP, and HTML by Christmas 1990 at CERN.
The World Wide Web is only one of many Internet services, not the Internet itself. The Web is the global collection of web pages, documents, and other resources linked by hyperlinks and Uniform Resource Identifiers, accessed mainly through HyperText Transfer Protocol. The Internet also carries email, file sharing, and Internet telephony.
The Internet has no single central governing body, and each constituent network sets its own policies. The Internet Engineering Task Force handles standardization of the core protocols, while the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers administers the principal name spaces, including domain names and IP addresses.
As of 2025, the International Telecommunication Union estimated that 6 billion people, or 74 percent of the world's population, used the Internet, while 2.2 billion remained offline. By 2018, Asia accounted for 51 percent of all users, with China reaching 802 million users that year.
IPv4, designed in 1981, defines an IP address as a 32-bit number and was built to address up to roughly 4.3 billion hosts. IPv6, developed in the mid-1990s and standardized in 1998, uses 128 bits for far larger addressing capacity, after IPv4 address exhaustion entered its final stage in 2011.