Services
World Wide Web
Many people use the terms Internet and World
Wide Web, or just the Web, interchangeably, but the two terms
are not synonymous. TheWorld Wide Web is only one of hundreds of services used on the Internet.
The Web is a global set of documents, images and other resources, logically
interrelated by hyperlinks and referenced with Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs). URIs symbolically identify
services,servers,
and other databases, and the documents and resources that they can
provide. Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is the main access protocol of
the World Wide Web. Web
services also use HTTP to
allow software systems to communicate in order to share and exchange business
logic and data.
Communication
Email is an important communications service available on the
Internet. The concept of sending electronic text messages between parties in a
way analogous to mailing letters or memos predates the creation of the
Internet. Pictures, documents and other files are sent as email
attachments. Emails can be cc-ed to multiple email
addresses.
Data transfer
File
sharing is an example of
transferring large amounts of data across the Internet. A computer
file can be emailed
to customers, colleagues and friends as an attachment. It can be uploaded to a
website or FTP server
for easy download by others. It can be put into a "shared location"
or onto a file server for instant use by colleagues. The load of bulk downloads
to many users can be eased by the use of "mirror"
servers or peer-to-peer networks. In any of these cases, access to the file may be
controlled by userauthentication, the transit of the file over the Internet may be obscured
by encryption, and money may change hands for access to the file. The price
can be paid by the remote charging of funds from, for example, a credit card
whose details are also passed – usually fully encrypted – across the
Internet. The origin and authenticity of the file received may be checked
by digital signatures or by MD5 or other message digests. These simple
features of the Internet, over a worldwide basis, are changing the production,
sale, and distribution of anything that can be reduced to a computer file for
transmission. This includes all manner of print publications, software
products, news, music, film, video, photography, graphics and the other arts.
This in turn has caused seismic shifts in each of the existing industries that
previously controlled the production and distribution of these products.
Users
Internet users per 100 inhabitants
Overall Internet usage has seen tremendous growth. From 2000 to
2009, the number of Internet users globally rose from 394 million to 1.858
billion. By 2010, 22 percent of the world's
population had access to computers with 1 billion Google searches every day, 300 million Internet
users reading blogs, and 2 billion videos viewed daily on YouTube.
The prevalent language for communication on the Internet has
been English. This may be a result of the origin of the Internet, as well as
the language's role as a lingua
franca. Early computer
systems were limited to the characters in the American Standard Code
for Information Interchange (ASCII),
a subset of the Latin
alphabet.
Social networking and
entertainment
Many people use the World Wide Web to access news, weather and
sports reports, to plan and book vacations and to find out more about their
interests. People use chat, messaging and email to make and stay in
touch with friends worldwide, sometimes in the same way as some previously
had pen
pals. The Internet has
seen a growing number of Web
desktops, where users can
access their files and settings via the Internet.
Social networking websites such as Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace have
created new ways to socialize and interact. Users of these sites are able to
add a wide variety of information to pages, to pursue common interests, and to
connect with others. It is also possible to find existing acquaintances, to
allow communication among existing groups of people. Sites like LinkedIn foster commercial and business connections.
YouTube and Flickr specialize
in users' videos and photographs.
Electronic business
Electronic business (E-business) involves business processes
spanning the entire value
chain: electronic
purchasing and supply chain management, processing orders electronically, handling customer service,
and cooperating with business partners. E-commerce seeks to add revenue streams using the
Internet to build and enhance relationships with clients and partners.
According to research firm IDC, the size of total worldwide e-commerce, when
global business-to-business and -consumer transactions are added together, will
equate to $16 trillion in 2013. IDate, another research
firm, estimates the global market for digital products and services at $4.4
trillion in 2013. A report by Oxford Economics adds those two together to estimate the
total size of the digital
economy at $20.4
trillion, equivalent to roughly 13.8% of global sales.
Telecommuting
Remote work is facilitated by tools such as groupware, virtual private networks, conference calling, videoconferencing, and Voice
over IP (VOIP). It can
be efficient and useful for companies as it allows workers to communicate over
long distances, saving significant amounts of travel time and cost. As broadband Internet connections become more
commonplace, more and more workers have adequate bandwidth at home to use these
tools to link their home to their corporate intranet and internal phone networks.
Crowdsourcing
Internet provides a particularly good venue for crowdsourcing (outsourcing tasks to a distributed group of people)
since individuals tend to be more open in web-based projects where they are not
being physically judged or scrutinized and thus can feel more comfortable
sharing.
Crowdsourcing systems are used to accomplish a variety of tasks.
For example, the crowd may be invited to develop a new technology, carry out a
design task, refine or carry out the steps of an algorithm (see human-based computation), or help capture, systematize, or analyze large amounts of
data (see also citizen
science).
Politics and political
revolutions
The Internet has achieved new relevance as a political tool. The
presidential campaign of Howard
Dean in 2004 in the
United States was notable for its success in soliciting donation via the
Internet. Many political groups use the Internet to achieve a new method of
organizing in order to carry out their mission, having given rise to Internet
activism, most notably
practiced by rebels in the Arab
Spring.
The New York Times suggested that social
media websites, such
as Facebook and Twitter, helped people organize the political revolutions in
Egypt where it helped certain classes of protesters organize protests,
communicate grievances, and disseminate information.
Philanthropy
The spread of low-cost Internet access in developing countries
has opened up new possibilities for peer-to-peer charities, which allow individuals to
contribute small amounts to charitable projects for other individuals.
Websites, such as DonorsChoose and GlobalGiving,
allow small-scale donors to direct funds to individual projects of their
choice.
A popular twist on Internet-based philanthropy is the use
of peer-to-peer lending for charitable purposes. Kiva pioneered this concept in 2005, offering
the first web-based service to publish individual loan profiles for funding.
Kiva raises funds for local intermediary microfinance organizations which post stories and
updates on behalf of the borrowers. Lenders can contribute as little as $25 to
loans of their choice, and receive their money back as borrowers repay. Kiva
falls short of being a pure peer-to-peer charity, in that loans are disbursed
before being funded by lenders and borrowers do not communicate with lenders
themselves.
Surveillance
The vast majority of computer surveillance involves the
monitoring of data and traffic on the Internet. In the United
States for example, under the Communications
Assistance For Law Enforcement Act, all phone calls and broadband internet traffic (emails, web
traffic, instant messaging, etc.) are required to be available for unimpeded
real-time monitoring by Federal law enforcement agencies.
Censorship
Internet censorship and
surveillance by country
Pervasive censorship
Substantial censorship
Selective censorship
Changing situation
Little or no censorship
Not classified / no data
Some governments, such as those of Burma, Iran, North Korea, the Mainland China, Saudi Arabia and theUnited Arab Emirates restrict what people in their countries can access on the
Internet, especially political and religious content. This is accomplished
through software that filters domains and content so that they may not be
easily accessed or obtained without elaborate circumvention.
