What is Internet? What is its most important feature?

The Internet is the global system of interconnected computer networks that use the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to link devices worldwide. It is a network of networks that consists of private, public, academic, business, and government networks of local to global scope, linked by a broad array of electronic, wireless, and optical networking technologies. The Internet carries an extensive range of information resources and services, such as the inter-linked hypertext documents and applications of the World Wide Web (WWW), electronic mail, telephony, and peer-to-peer networks for file sharing.

Internet use grew rapidly in the West from the mid-1990s and from the late 1990s in the developing world. In the 20 years since 1995, Internet use has grown 100-times, measured for the period of one year, to over one third of the world population. Most traditional communications media, including telephony, radio, television, paper mail and newspapers are being reshaped or redefined by the Internet, giving birth to new services such as email, Internet telephony, Internet television music, digital newspapers, and video streaming websites. Newspaper, book, and other print publishing are adapting to website technology, or are reshaped into blogging, web feeds and online news aggregators. The entertainment industry was initially the fastest growing segment on the Internet. The Internet has enabled and accelerated new forms of personal interactions through instant messaging, Internet forums, and social networking. Online shopping has grown exponentially both for major retailers and small businesses and entrepreneurs, as it enables firms to extend their "bricks and mortar" presence to serve a larger market or even sell goods and services entirely online. Business-to-business and financial services on the Internet affect supply chains across entire industries.

   The Internet has no centralized governance in either technological implementation or policies for access and usage; each constituent network sets its own policies. Only the overreaching definitions of the two principal name spaces in the Internet, the Internet Protocol address space and the Domain Name System (DNS), are directed by a maintainer organization, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). The technical underpinning and standardization of the core protocols is an activity of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), a non-profit organization of loosely affiliated international participants that anyone may associate with by contributing technical expertise.

What is the most important feature of the Internet? Dis-intermediation!

When asked what I believe is the most important feature of the Internet, I boil it down to one thing: dis-intermediation.

One often discussed feature is open vendor-neutral standards which allow software from any number of for-profit or non-profit projects to interoperate with each other. What makes this feature important is the fact that there is no single vendor or other organization that controls this network or acts as an intermediary between senders (producers, creators, publishers, etc) and receivers (audiences, consumers, etc) in the communication. The networks before the Internet were all proprietary and the individual components were created by the same company.

One of the central design principles of TCP/IP is the end-to-end principlewhere you had a dumb network with smart endpoints. This is what allowed there to be innovation at these endpoints that did not require the permission of the providers of the underlying network in order to be created. Whether it was Simple Mail Transport Protocol (SMTP) to exchange email or Hyper-Text Transport Protocol (HTTP) to exchange web-pages, these were all innovations that did not require changes to the underlying network, or permission from any intermediary.

What is the Web server?

Web technologies are the establishments that make it possible for computers to communicate and share resources. And the Web is a collection of document, image, video, and sound files that can be linked and accessed over the Internet using a protocol called HTTP. It is also called as World Wide Web. It was discovered by computer scientist sir Tim Berners-Lee in 1989. Web is global information medium which users can read and write via computers connected to the computers. Web was specifications for URLs, HTML, and HTTP. 

A Web site is a related collection of World Wide Web (WWW) files that includes a beginning file called a home page. Each Web site contains a home page, which is the first document users see when they enter the site. The site might also contain additional documents and files.

Every Website sites on a computer known as a Web server. This server is always connected to the internet. "Web server" can refer to hardware or software, or both of them working together. A web server is a computer that stores websites on the Internet and delivers web pages to viewers upon request. Every web server has a unique address, called an Internet Protocol address, that tells other computers connected to the Internet where to find the server.

There comes a word like web page. A web page is accessed by entering a URL address and may contain text, graphics, and hyperlinks to other web pages and files.All web pages that you see on the Internet use HTML to format its pages for display in a web browser.

Web servers are used to store process and deliver the pages of a web site to users.So a Web Server is basically a PC that is designed to accept requests from remote computers and send on the information requested.