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No single company or government owns the internet. It is tens of thousands of independent networks, run by phone companies, universities, businesses and others, that agree to pass data to one another using shared rules called protocols.

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Data travels in small chunks called packets, each labelled with its destination, which may take different routes before being put back together. The core rules, known as TCP/IP, were proposed in 1974 by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, and the ARPANET, the American research network the internet grew from, switched to them on 1 January 1983. Today the rules are developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force, an open community anyone can join by contributing, while ICANN, a non-profit organisation, coordinates domain names and the numerical addresses that identify connected devices. A message from Istanbul to London may pass through several companies' cables and routers, the machines that send packets on their way, in a fraction of a second.

Türkçe oku
Hiçbir şirket ya da devlet internetin sahibi değildir. İnternet, telekom şirketlerinin, üniversitelerin, işletmelerin ve başka kuruluşların işlettiği on binlerce bağımsız ağdan oluşur. Bu ağlar, protokol denen ortak kurallara uyarak birbirlerine veri aktarır.

Veriler, paket denen küçük parçalar hâlinde yol alır; her paketin üzerinde gideceği adres yazılıdır. Paketler farklı yollardan gidebilir ve varış noktasında yeniden birleştirilir. Temel kurallar olan TCP/IP'yi 1974'te Vint Cerf ile Bob Kahn önerdi. İnternetin doğduğu Amerikan araştırma ağı ARPANET, 1 Ocak 1983'te bu kurallara geçti. Bugün bu kuralları, İnternet Mühendisliği Görev Gücü (IETF) adlı açık bir topluluk geliştiriyor; katkı vermek isteyen herkes bu topluluğa katılabilir. Kâr amacı gütmeyen bir kuruluş olan ICANN ise alan adlarını ve internete bağlı cihazları tanımlayan sayısal adresleri düzenliyor. İstanbul'dan Londra'ya giden bir mesaj, saniyenin çok küçük bir bölümünde birkaç şirketin kablolarından ve paketlere yol gösteren cihazlardan, yani yönlendiricilerden geçebilir.

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