Topic > Understanding the growth of the Internet and its impact on society

Did you realize that the Internet is today the most successful and continuously growing mass medium used daily? The growth of the Internet has given the masses around the world the ability to weigh in on various topics, from social issues to political shenanigans, affecting countries around the world today. The Internet has also enabled the growth and expansion of an unknown number of businesses, which would otherwise never have grown, given its ability to reach an unlimited number of individuals anywhere and everywhere. Our ability to access the Internet, not only from home, but also through various forms of portable devices, such as smartphones, tablets and laptops, has given us a much more mobile world, in every aspect, although initially conceived as a form of communication in wartime, developed by the United States Department of Defense. The precursor to the Internet was created by a group called The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPAnet), as a distributed communications network (Richard Campbell, 2013) in the event of a nuclear catastrophe, ARPAnet was in principle only a form of communication from from one point to another where users accessed what they called a network, thus allowing information to be shared whenever necessary. The way information could travel from one place to another within a network was in the form of decomposed compressed data called packet switching. “This is a method of breaking data files into small packets or blocks to send them across a network” (Teach-ICT.com Limited, 2002). In fact, it was a question of laying the foundations of what would later become the Internet. The World Wide Web, was created in the 1990s by Tim Berners-Lee, the web was built to allow people to access information for free, anywhere in the world, without anyone having control of the Internet, the World Wide Web The Web allowed information to be read, stored, uploaded, and retrieved anywhere on the Internet using an associated link. Lee had a big role in this because what he did, Lee said, “Net neutrality is the guiding principle of the Internet: it preserves our right to communicate freely online. This is the definition of the open Internet.2. Net neutrality means an Internet that allows and protects free speech. This means that Internet service providers should provide us with open networks and should not block or discriminate against any applications or content that circulates on those networks. Just as your phone company shouldn't decide who you can call and what you say during that call, your ISP shouldn't care about the content you view or post online.3. Without net neutrality, phone and cable companies could divide the Internet into fast and slow lanes. An ISP might slow down its competitors' content or block political opinions it doesn't agree with. ISPs could charge additional fees to the few content companies that could afford to pay for preferential treatment, relegating everyone else to a slower service tier. This would destroy the open Internet” (FreePress,