On August 6, 1991, CERN, which straddles the border between France and Switzerland, publicized the new World Wide Web project. The Web was invented by English scientist Tim Berners-Lee in 1989. There are many browsers in use today, but all of there look back to an early popular web browser known as ViolaWWW. According to BBG Communications, it was patterned after HyperCard and built using the X Window System. It was eventually replaced in popularity by the Mosaic web browser.
Mosaic version 1.0 was released in 1993 by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois. Not long after, by late 1994 public interest in the previously academic, technical Internet started to grow. And only two years later, in 1996, the word Internet had become a public, if not yet a household buzzword. And consequently, so had its use as a synecdoche in reference to the World Wide Web.
Over the course of the Internet's expansion, it also saw to its absorption of the majority of previously existing public computer networks (although some networks, such as FidoNet, have remained separate). For the whole of the 1990s, the Internet grew by 100% per year, with occasional explosive movement in 1996 and 1997. This explosive growth in the Internet was often attributed to its decentralized nature, which allowed the organic growth of the network, including the non-proprietary nature of the Internet protocols. These encouraged vendor interoperability and prevented any one company from exerting too much control over the network.
With the rise of the internet comes the establishment of regulatory bodies. One of these is the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) headquartered in Marina del Rey, California, and overseen by an international board of directors drawn from across the Internet technical, business, academic, and non-commercial communities It is mandated to coordinate the assignment of unique identifiers on the Internet, including domain names, Internet Protocol (IP) addresses, and protocol port and parameter numbers.
As perhaps many are familiar by now, a globally unified namespace (i.e., a system of names in which there is at most one holder for each possible name) is essential for the Internet to function. It is like a physical home address, there would only be one particular address in a certain locality.
To date, the US government continues to have the primary role in approving changes to the root zone file that lies at the heart of the domain name system. ICANN's role in coordinating the assignment of unique identifiers is the nearest it could get to a central coordinating body on the global Internet. But even if it is the nearest to a central coordinating authority, its scope extends only to the Internet's systems of domain names, IP addresses, protocol ports and parameter numbers.
The absence of a governing body for the Internet is due to the very nature of the network itself - voluntarily interconnected networks. This does not mean that there is no discussion to possibly having one. On November 16, 2005, the World Summit on the Information Society, held in Tunis, established the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) to discuss Internet-related issues.
Article Directory : http://www.articlecube.com
