I’m familiar with the concept of a Web, and with the idea that a lot of what we access when we surf is information stored on servers owned by schools and the gummint.
However, that does not account for all of the infrastructure. Is there in fact a series of immense servers that serve as a backbone, so to speak, of the Internet. Or is it truly a virtual network that is nothing more than the sum of the isolated, self-supported parts? ( By self-supported, I mean that each owner of a server has to pay to maintain the server, pay for bandwidth uploading, etc. )
Say I Google something innocuous, like…say… The Shroud of Turin. There are 148,000 hits on Google. It cost me nothing to do that search.
Is all of the Internet self-supported, or are there structures in place that are supported by outside resources?
Basically, everyone pays for their part of the net.
There are defined, publically-available-at-no-cost standards that govern how it all connects together. Anyone can obtain the standards, follow procedures, and connect a new part to the net. Many have. And thus the net grows.
I pay for my computer, my connection, and my website hosting. The fees for my connection and hosting go to two companies; together with all their other customers’ fees, those fees supports those companies’ wires, servers, buildings, etc. The companies in turn pay for their connections to other servers and communications channels.
There is a ‘backbone’ to the net, but it is defined more by high-speed communications channels than by ‘servers’ per se.
Many governments provide part of the backbone as a public service… but from the net’s viewpoint, they’re just another sort of customer.
Google makes its money through selling advertising and stock. So far, it has kept the ball in the air…
On a related note, Google’s expenses (which they pay through ad sales and financing) would include bandwidth not only to receive queries and send search results to those people, but presumably a lot of bandwidth for the sake of continually ‘spidering’ the web, scanning all the web sites in their database and keeping the indexes up to date, following new links, counting various links to recalculate the matching algorithms, and so on. That’s what’s involved in being able to tell you about those 148,000 shroud of turin matches. (though that’s probably just an approximation. If you keep clicking through the ‘more matches’ in google search, you can often see the match count go up or down.)
In addition to the advertising bucks, Google also receives a small amount of revenue from Google Answers. 25 percent of the fee for each answered question goes into Google’s coffers.
You have to pay a fee of some sort to your internet service provider. They, in turn, have to pay their network service provider, if they aren’t one themselves. The network service providers (mostly big companies like AT&T) own the wires that the information travels over, which may also be used for other purposes like phone service.
Most of the individual servers are owned by individual companies that have nothing to do with the wires connecting them. Google owns the Google servers, Microsoft owns the Microsoft servers, etc. These companies also have to pay their service providers. Where they get the money for this depends on the company: Some sell ads, some consider the web page itself an ad for their own company, some do it out of their own pocket just for the heck of it, and so on. I think a few of the top-level servers are operated by the government of the U. S. or other nations, but the U. S. might have sold them to private industry (except for mil, gov, and us, of course).
As far as paying for the a lot of the Internet connectivity, think of it like a really weird Water Utility. The key thing is that most people pay by the size of the pipe they have connecting them. The bigger the pipe (the more bandwidth available) the more you pay. At the low end of course is dial up which is so slow it would be essentially free if bandwidth were the only issue. (At that end, mostly you’re paying for the other things like tech support and such.) Once you get into the T# categories, the $s start to mount up.
Note, that whether you use your big fat pipe or not frequently doesn’t matter. It’s the size that counts, or words to that effect.
Among the major backbone players, they have to interconnect to each other so that their respective customers can interact. Here, the agreements have to take into account the actual number of bits used. If one company is sending a lot more traffic thru the link, then the other company is going to expect compensation.
That’s not really true. There is a cost to your upstream provider for routing your network traffic to other networks. In particular, because you are sharing your provider’s network resources with other customers, the more traffic you have, the more bandwidth and equipment must be purchased to keep the other customers happy. Thus many large-scale providers charge not only for the pipe, but for the amount of traffic as well.