Understanding Internet Growth and Its Impact on Society

Have you realized that the Internet is now the most successful and continuous growing daily used mass medium? The Internet’s growth has given the ability for the masses thought the whole world to chime in on various topics from social issues, to political shenanigans, affecting countries all over the globe today. The Internet has also allowed for an unpresented amount businesses to grow and expand, which might have never grown otherwise, given its ability to reach a limitless amount of individuals anywhere and everywhere. Our capability to access the Internet, not just from home, but also through various forms of portable devices, such as smartphone, tablets, and laptops has provided us with a world that’s much more mobile, in every facet,

Although initially conceived as a form of communication during wartime, developed by United States Department of Defense. The precursor of the Internet was created by a group called, The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPAnet), as a distributed communication network (Richard Campbell, 2013)in case of a nuclear catastrophe, ARPAnet was in principle just a form of communication from one point to another which had users log into what they called a network, thus allowing for information to be shared whenever necessary. The way information was able to travel from one location to another within a network was in broken down form of compressed data called packet switching. “This is a method of breaking data files into small packets or chunks in order to send them across a network” (Teach-ICT.com Limited, 2002). This was in fact, laying out the outsets of what was then to become, the Internet. The World Wide Web, was created in the 1990’s by a Tim Berners-Lee, the web was built in order to allow individuals to access information for free, anywhere in the world, without any one person having control of the Internet, the World Wide Web allowed information to be read, stored, uploaded and retrieved anywhere on the internet using a link that was associated to it. Lee was huge part of that because what he did he, Lee laid down

“Net Neutrality is the Internet’s guiding principle: It preserves our right to communicate freely online. This is the definition of an open Internet.

2. Net Neutrality means an Internet that enables and protects free speech. It means that Internet service providers should provide us with open networks — and should not block or discriminate against any applications or content that ride over those networks. Just as your phone company shouldn 't decide who you can call and what you say on that call, your ISP shouldn 't be concerned with the content you view or post online.

3. Without Net Neutrality, cable and phone companies could carve the Internet into fast and slow lanes. An ISP could slow down its competitors ' content or block political opinions it disagreed with. ISPs could charge extra fees to the few content companies that could afford to pay for preferential treatment — relegating everyone else to a slower tier of service. This would destroy the open Internet” (FreePress,