The Internet is less a publishing operation than a giant conversation. But most of us still take in most of what we read fairly passively. The Internet is the global information system that includes communication capabilities and many high level applications. The existing connectivity of the Internet made it possible for users and servers all over the world to participate in this activity. The Internet is built on connectivity which is a very simple commodity. With connectivity, services such as telephony and television delivery are very simple applications.

The internet is wonderful and allows individuals to develop ideas without major financial backing. But NEVER will an amateur develop a new idea in quantum chromodynamics and lack the appropriate channels to disseminate his ideas. The Internet is like a vast uncataloged library. Whether you're using Hotbot, Lycos, Dogpile, Infoseek, or any one of a dozen other search or metasearch engines, you're not searching the entire Web. The Internet is also an effective platform for getting customer feedback into both product marketing and operations.

The Internet is at once a world-wide broadcasting capability, a mechanism for information dissemination, and a medium for collaboration and interaction between individuals and their computers without regard for geographic location. The internet is not free. The bandwidth must be paid for. The Internet is good, but not because it cannot be regulated. Like anything else, policies are voiced and implemented on the Internet.

The Internet is for everyone - but it won't be if its users cannot protect their privacy and the confidentiality of transactions conducted on the network. Let us dedicate ourselves to the proposition that cryptographic technology sufficient to protect privacy from unauthorized disclosure should be freely available, applicable and exportable. The internet is, at its core, a content delivery system, and as several people have pointed out, the internet is already fragmented. In addition to Linguarum's comment about linguistic and location-based divisions, you also have mobile versions of sites, content-based ads (Google), and profile-specific filtering (Facebook and twitter feeds). The Internet is a seething morass of good and bad memes, engaged in an evolutionary battle to propagate across as many servers (and brains) as possible. This is a good thing.

The Internet is not designed for the iPhone. That's why they've got 75,000 applications - they're all trying to make the Internet look decent on the iPhone. The Internet is no topic like cellphones or video game platforms or artificial intelligence; it's a topic like education. It's that big. The Internet is nothing more than software, in other words. So there's no real distinction between the services Verizon offers its Internet customers and the services Google offers its Internet customers.

The internet is inhospitable to that kind of quietness. If your browser were to happen on such a page, your eyes would likely go blank with impatience. The Internet isn't really one-although it has significant common aspects-and I needed to explain why in order to make it clear precisely what problems moderation patterns solve. The internet is more like flat land, and what things survive on it depends more on utility and use in the end than trendiness alone.

People estimate there are roughly 75 million servers worldwide, but this number may be off by up to a factor of five. The traffic that runs through the Internet in a single day might seem like it would be easily measured, but in fact it is very hard to find a reliable collection of this data, because of the sheer amount of computers, servers, and nations involved. If a major disaster wiped out all knowledge of the internet, we'd spend far more time trying to reinvent the internet than reinvent the Web and everything that came after. In order for us to progress, we need brilliance and brilliance isn't fair and it's not polite and it's not -- we can't grow it. Genius happens and it doesn't always happen in a zip code where we can access it.