Today's Internet
The Internet is held together by bi- or multilateral commercial contracts (for example peering agreements) and by technical specifications or protocolss that describe how to exchange data over the network. These protocols are formed by discussion within the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and its working groups, which are open to public participation and review. These committees produce documents that are known as Request for Comments documents (RFCs). Some RFCs are raised to the status of Internet Standard by the Internet Architecture Board (IAB).
Some of the most used protocols in the Internet protocol suite are IP, TCP, UDP, DNS, PPP, SLIP, ICMP, POP3, IMAP, SMTP, HTTP, HTTPS, SSH, Telnet, FTP, LDAP, and SSL.
Some of the popular services on the Internet that make use of these protocols are e-mail, Usenet newsgroups, file sharing, the World Wide Web, Gopher, session access, WAIS, finger, IRC, MUDs, and MUSHs. Of these, e-mail and the World Wide Web are clearly the most used, and many other services are built upon them, such as mailing lists and web logs. The internet makes it possible to provide real-time services such as web radio and webcasts that can be accessed from anywhere in the world.
Some other popular services of the Internet were not created this way, but were originally based on proprietary systems.
These include IRC, ICQ, AIM, CDDB, and Gnutella.
There have been many analyses of the Internet and its structure.
For example, it has been determined that the Internet IP routing structure
and hypertext links of the World Wide Web are examples of scale-free networks.
Similar to how the commercial Internet providers connect via Internet exchange points, research networks tend to interconnect into large subnetworks such as:
These in turn are built around relatively smaller networks such as:
