Why is there only one in a historic and technical sense?
Because there’s little incentive for multiple networks, or protocols. Standardization works wonders in technology. When I was a kid you either had a prodigy or compuserve email. Or an email on some BBS that might or might not forward. Or you used something like Fidonet.
In the meantime universities and larger organizations were standardizing on TCP/IP which is the protocol of the Internet. The Internet is just a name of a bunch of networks tied together and speaking TCP/IP. Time Berners Lee invented the Web, which is an application that runs on the internet. It became very popular very quickly the old proprietary systems and walled gardens quickly fell as people started using Internet based communications like SMTP for email and Web for content instead of logging into Prodigy or the local BBS. It was quite revolutionary and unexpected.
The main reason the internet is popular is because it doesn’t consist of 100 different protocols and providers who refuse to talk to each other. We expect name resolution (DNS) to work and the ability to route packets wherever we choose. On top of this we can build things like the web, twitter, email, steaming video, etc. The internet doesn’t make sense if there were two of them or ten of them. If there were then all this stuff would fail to work.
That said, China has been threatening to run its own DNS, but its a lot of talk IMHO. They would divorce themselves from the world and the real cost of that would be tremendous. Look at North Korea’s attempt to be an island onto itself.
They could be, but they aren’t, because that would be stupid.
In fact, I bet it wouldn’t even work. BNL would need to access nameservers on the public Internet to resolve any hostnames for routing over I2. They’re far too big to be manually distributing hosts files.
That’s like saying that all of the computers on my home network don’t have to be connected to the internet.
Of course they don’t have to be, I can just string a series of Linksys routers together, between me and my neighbors, and we could even use Bonjour IM. That doesn’t mean it’s the internet, that means it’s a large, local network.
Even if I ran a cable from New York City to Boston, and hooked up both cities, entirely, to the new network and broke (magically) the “old internet,” it’d still just be a small ghost of a network in comparison to the actual internet.
Plenty of companies have their own private Intranets, usually “before” the internet. At the company I’m with, all of the their computers (world wide) are on the same network, we can click “network connections” and see every computer on the local intranet (thousands of them). We can even access web pages – typing in “Wired” and pressing enter into the address bar doesn’t redirect to wired.com, it redirects to wired.[internal].com, and you can’t even access most subdomains of [internal].com without being on the intra-network, so going to wired.[internal].com right now from outside of the network would give me a 404 error (or permission denied error, not sure).
So there are private “webs” or intranets, but the internet itself is more defined as the network of networks. Think of it less as a single thing, and more like the Interstate Highway System. Sure, there are separate highways, and there are separate roads. But what’s the point of a road if you can’t get to it? If you can’t get there, you can’t drive on it. It’s a beautiful home, almost free, stunning amenities, huge back yard…
I always feel a little weird when I see .co.uk or .au or some such - as if non-US websites were some how subservient. Sure, we have .gov and .us (which I rarely see) websites, but you know what I mean.
Sorry, kinda OT, but I really liked the OP’s question.
SIPRNet, as far as I know, is totally isolated from the public Internet; they don’t ever connect the same hardware to both SIPRnet and any other network. The network links are all encrypted and physically hardened, but the network itself runs ordinary IP. That means you can run normal TCP/IP applications like email and web browsers on the network, but they don’t have access to anything on the public Internet and vice versa.
That means you need a dedicated computer on your desk just for accessing SIPRnet, separate from your regular computer.
Hi, you guys! Hey, look, no time for more than a quick note, but wanted you to know we’re fine over here, on The Other Internet.
Sure, we get a little tired of the free shrimp cocktail, but as long as you use plenty of sunscreen you get used to the constant sunshine. Oh! Shoot – late for tetherball. I’ll stop back after the mandatory TopShelfTequila.com party. Hang loose, gang!
True and false at the same time: The Internet still runs through the phone system in that people still use dial-up and DSL and, in the wilds of Europe, ISDN, all of which rely on phone company wires and other hardware. If a phone line is carrying Internet traffic, it’s part of the Internet.
However, it’s true the phone system carries a lot of non-Internet traffic.
No, you just need multiple DNS roots and configuration files on each computer to tell them which DNS servers to query.
However, that still means the traffic will still flow through the Internet. If you want a non-Internet internet (a collection of heterogeneous networks that is distinct from the Internet) you need to duplicate a lot more of what the Internet provides, down to having what amount to ‘non-Internet ISPs’ to allow people and companies with smaller network connections access to your little internet.
Wrong entirely. HTTP and HTTPS are different applicaton protocols, which could be used on any network at all. They’re not relevant to this discussion.
Not really. We did until the Internet at the world in the 1990s, but not nearly as much anymore.