RFC 1935

What is the Internet, Anyway?

📅 published April 1996, from ietf

What is the Internet, Anyway? 🎀

Part 1 of 3 💖

Network Working Group: RFC 1935 ✨
Authors: J. Quarterman and S. Carl-Mitchell, both from TIC 🌸
Category: Informational 📚
Date: April 1996 📅
Obsoletes or updates: the header lists nothing it obsoletes or updates 🦋

Status of This Memo ✨

Okay, first the boring-but-important bit 🙈. This memo gives information to the Internet community. It does not specify an Internet standard of any kind, so it's more of a "here's what's going on" than a rulebook. And distribution of this memo is unlimited, so share away 💜.

Copyright (c) 1994 TIC 💅

Here's the legal stuff, copied word for word so nothing gets lost in translation:

Copyright (c) 1994  TIC

        From Matrix News, 4(8), August 1994
        Permission is hereby granted for redistribution of this article
        provided that it is redistributed in its entirety, including
        the copyright notice and this notice.
        Contact: mids@tic.com, +1-512-451-7602, fax: +1-512-452-0127.
        http://www.tic.com/mids, gopher://gopher.tic.com/11/matrix/news
        A shorter version of this article appeared in MicroTimes.

Introduction 🌈

Okay, so we keep hearing about the Internet, right? The press calls it the prototype of the Information Highway 🛣️, a research tool 🔬, open for business 💼, and not ready for prime time 🙄. It's also a place your children might communicate with (pick one) a. strangers, b. teachers, c. pornographers, d. other children, e. their parents 😬. Apparently it's bigger than Poland but smaller than Chicago 🗺️, a place to surf 🏄, the biggest hype since Woodstock ✌️, a competitive business tool 📈, and the newest thing since sliced bread 🍞. Make it make sense 💀.

A recent New York Times article quoted one of us about how big the Internet is, and it caused a whole ruckus 😭. The exact figures attributed to John in the article are not the ones we recommended for that use. The real drama is whether the Internet is, as the gist of the article said, smaller than many other estimates have said. Clearly lots of people really want to believe it's huge 👀. The discussion that followed showed some people want that so badly that they count computers and people that are probably going to be connected some time in the future, even if they aren't connected now. We prefer to talk about who is actually on the Internet and on other networks right now 💅. We'll get back to the sizes of the various networks later, but first let's tackle a more basic question that sits at the heart of all the confusion and contention about sizes: what is the Internet, anyway? 🤔

Starting at the Center 🌸

Okay, real confusion starts when you try to agree on what counts as part of the Internet 😭. Is it NSFNET? CIX? Your company's internal network? Prodigy? FidoNet? The mainframe in accounting? Some people would include all of the above, and maybe even exclude anything politically incorrect 🙈. Others have doubts about every single one of them.

Let's start somewhere almost everyone agrees is on the Internet: RIPE 🇳🇱. The acronym stands for European IP Networks, and RIPE is a coordinating group for IP networking in Europe. (IP is the Internet protocol, which is the basis of the Internet. IP has a suite of associated protocols, including the Transmission Control Protocol, or TCP, and the name IP, or sometimes TCP/IP, is often used to refer to the whole protocol suite.) RIPE's computers are physically located in Amsterdam 🌷. The important thing for us is that you can reach RIPE, usually through its domain ripe.net, from just about anywhere anyone would agree is on the Internet ✨.

Reach it with what? Basically any service anyone would agree is related to the Internet 🧚. RIPE has a WWW (World Wide Web) server, a Gopher server, and an anonymous FTP server, so they share documents and other resources through hypertext, menu browsing, and file retrieval 📂. Their people also use client programs such as Mosaic and Lynx to access other people's servers, which makes RIPE both a distributor and a consumer of resources via WWW, Gopher, and FTP 🔁. They support TELNET interfaces to some of their services, and of course they can TELNET out and log in remotely anywhere they have personal login accounts, or anywhere someone offers an anonymous TELNET service, like a library catalog 📚. They also have electronic mail 💌, they run some mailing lists, and some of their people read and post news articles to USENET newsgroups 📰.

WWW, Gopher, FTP, TELNET, mail, lists, and news: that's a pretty iconic set of major Internet services 👑. There are plenty of more obscure ones too, but it's pretty safe to say that an organization like RIPE, reachable with all of these services, is on the Internet 💜.

Reachable from where? 🤨 Russia first connected to the Internet in 1992. For a while it was reachable from networks in the Commercial Internet Exchange (CIX) and from various other networks, but not from NSFNET, the U.S. National Science Foundation network. Back then some people considered NSFNET so important that they didn't count Russia as reachable, since it wasn't accessible through NSFNET. But there are now several other U.S. backbone networks as fast as NSFNET (T3 or 45Mbps), and routing through NSFNET isn't very restricted anymore, so few people would make that distinction now 🙌. For the moment, let's just say reachable through NSFNET or CIX networks, and get back to services 🍓.

Looking at Firewalls 🔥

Lowkey, lots of companies and other organizations run networks that are deliberately firewalled 🧱. Their users can reach servers like the ones at ripe.net, but nobody outside the company network can reach company hosts. So a user on one of these networks can use WWW, Gopher, FTP, and TELNET, but cannot supply resources through those protocols to people outside the company 🙃. A network owned and operated by a company to support its own operations is called an enterprise network, so let's call these enterprise IP networks, since they typically use the Internet Protocol (IP) to support these services 💼. Some companies connect their enterprise IP networks to the Internet without firewalls, but most do use firewalls, and those are the ones we care about here, since they're the ones with one-way access to these Internet services 🚪. Another name for an enterprise IP network, with or without a firewall, is an enterprise Internet 🏢.

For this distinction between suppliers and consumers, it doesn't matter whether the hosts behind the firewall reach servers beyond it through direct IP and TCP connections from their own IP addresses, or through proxy application gateways (such as SOCKS) at the firewall 🧦. Either way, they can use outside services, but they cannot supply them 🙅‍♀️.

So for services like WWW, Gopher, FTP, and TELNET, we can draw a useful line between supplier or distributor computers, like the ones at ripe.net, and consumer computers, like the ones inside firewalled enterprise IP networks 💖. It might seem more obvious to say producer computers and consumer computers, since those are more clearly paired terms. But the information a supplier computer distributes isn't necessarily produced on that computer or even inside its parent organization. In fact, most of the information on the bigger FTP archive servers is produced somewhere else 🗂️. So we choose distributors and consumers. Stores and shoppers would work about as well, if you prefer 🛍️.

Even more useful than talking about computers that are suppliers or consumers right now is a distinction between supplier-capable computers (not firewalled) and consumer-capable computers (firewalled) 🦋. A computer that isn't supplying information right now may be able to do it as soon as someone puts information on it and tells it to supply it. Setting up a WWW, Gopher, or FTP server isn't very hard, way less hard than getting corporate permission to breach a firewall 😤. Similarly, a computer may not be able to retrieve resources by WWW or Gopher at the moment, since client programs for those services usually don't come with the computer or its basic software. But almost any computer can be made capable of doing so by adding some software 🧩. In both cases, once you've got the basic IP network connection, adding capabilities for specific services is relatively easy ✨.

Let's call the non-firewalled computers the core Internet, and the core plus the consumer-capable computers the consumer Internet 🌐. Some people have called these two categories the Backbone Internet and the Internet Web. But we find the existing connotations of "Backbone" and "Web" confusing, so we prefer core Internet and consumer Internet 🫶.

It's true that many companies with firewalls have one or two computers carefully placed at the firewall so they can serve resources 🖥️. Employees may be able to place resources on those servers, but they can't serve resources directly from their own computers. It's kinda like having to reserve space on a single company delivery truck instead of owning one yourself 🚚. If you're talking about companies, yes, the company is fully on the core Internet, yet its users aren't as fully on the Internet as users who aren't behind a firewall 🥲.

If you're only interested in computers that can distribute information (maybe you're selling server software), that's a much smaller Internet than if you care about all the computers that can retrieve such information for their users (maybe you want to distribute information of your own) 📊. A few years ago it probably wouldn't have been hard to get agreement that firewalled company networks were a different kind of thing than the Internet itself. Nowadays firewalls are so popular that it's hard to find an enterprise IP network that isn't firewalled, and the total number of hosts on consumer-capable networks is probably almost as large as the number on the supplier-capable core of the Internet 🤯. So lots of people now like to include these consumer-capable networks along with the supplier-capable core when they talk about the Internet 💅.

Some people claim you can't measure the number of consumer-capable computers or users by measurements taken on the Internet itself. Maybe not 🤷‍♀️, but you can get an idea of how many actual consumers there are by counting accesses to selected servers and comparing the results to other known facts about the organizations doing the accessing 🔍. And there are other ways to get useful information about consumers on the Internet too, including asking them 🎤.

⏭️ Part 2 is coming up next, bestie 🦋💜

Mail, Lists, and News 📬

okay but what about mail, lists, and news?? 🤔 We left those out of the firewall chat on purpose, bestie, because almost all the firewalled networks let these communications services in and out. So there's not much of a useful difference between firewalled and non-firewalled networks when it comes to these services. That's because there's a huge difference between these communications services and the resource sharing (TELNET, FTP) and resource discovery (Gopher, WWW) services that firewalls usually filter. 💅

The communications services are normally batch, asynchronous, or store-and-forward. These descriptions basically mean the same thing, so pick whichever one you vibe with most 🫶 The point is that when you send mail, you compose a message and queue it for delivery. The actual delivery is a separate process. It might take seconds or hours, but it happens after you finish writing, and you usually don't have to sit there waiting for it to land before doing something else. It's pretty common for a mail system to batch up several messages going through one network link or to the same destination and then send them all at once 📦 And mail doesn't even always go straight to its final destination in one hop! It often gets stored at an intermediate spot and then forwarded to another computer, which is literally where the term store-and-forward comes from ✨ Mailing lists are built on top of the same delivery mechanisms as regular electronic mail. USENET news uses somewhat different delivery mechanisms, but they're also typically batch, asynchronous, and store-and-forward. Because it gets delivered this way, a mail message or a news article is much less likely to be a security problem than a TELNET, FTP, Gopher, or WWW connection 🔒 This is why firewalls usually let mail, lists, and news pass in both directions, but usually block incoming connections for those interactive protocols.

Because WWW, Gopher, TELNET, and FTP are basically interactive, you need IP or something like it to support them 🌐 Because mail, lists, and news are asynchronous, you can support them with protocols that aren't interactive, like UUCP and FidoNet. In fact, there are whole networks that do exactly that, called UUCP and FidoNet, among others. These networks carry mail and news, but they're not capable of supporting TELNET, FTP, Gopher, or WWW. We don't consider them part of the Internet, since they lack the most distinctive and characteristic services of the Internet 🦋

Some people argue that networks like FidoNet and UUCP should also count as part of the Internet, since electronic mail is the most-used service even on the core, supplier-capable Internet 💌 They further argue that the biggest benefit of the Internet is the community of discussion it supports, and that mail is enough to join that. Well, if mail is enough to be on the Internet, why is the Internet getting so much attention from the press and new users alike? 🤷‍♀️ Mail has been around for quite a while (1972 or 1973), but that's not what has made such an impression on the public. What has is the interactive services, and the interfaces to them, like Mosaic 🖥️ Asynchronous networks like FidoNet and UUCP don't support those interactive services, so they're not part of the Internet. Besides, if being part of a community of discussion was enough, we'd also have to include anyone with a fax machine or a telephone 📠 Recent events have demonstrated that all readers of the New York Times would also have to be included. 💀 With edges that vague, what would be the point in calling anything the Internet? We choose to stick with a definition of the Internet that requires the interactive services 👑

Some people argue that anything using RFC-822 mail is therefore using Internet mail and has to be part of the Internet. We find this about as plausible as arguing that anybody who flies in a Boeing 737 is using American equipment and is therefore inside the United States ✈️ Besides, there are plenty of systems out there that use mail but not RFC-822.

So what do we call systems that can exchange mail but aren't on the Internet? We say they're part of the Matrix, which is all computer systems worldwide that can exchange electronic mail 🌈 This term is borrowed (with permission) from Bill Gibson, the science fiction writer, and yes, it's giving sci-fi icon energy 🧚

Other people refer to the Matrix as global E-mail. That's accurate, but it's a description rather than a name. Some even call it the e-mail Internet. We find that term misleading, since if a system can only exchange mail, we don't consider it part of the Internet. Not to mention, not everything in the world defines itself in terms of the Internet or communicates through the Internet 🙈 FidoNet and WWIVnet, for example, have gateways between themselves that have nothing to do with the Internet. Calling the Matrix the Internet is kind of like calling the United Kingdom England. You can use it as convenient shorthand, but the Scots may disagree 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

What about news? Well, the set of all systems that exchange news already has a name: USENET 📰 USENET is presumably a subset of the Matrix, since it's hard to imagine a USENET node without mail, even though USENET itself is news, not mail. USENET is clearly not the same thing as the Internet, since many (almost certainly most) Internet nodes don't carry USENET news, and many USENET nodes are on other networks, especially UUCP, FidoNet, and BITNET 🍓

A few years ago it was popular in some corners of the press to try to equate USENET and the Internet. They're clearly not the same thing 💅 News, like mail, is an asynchronous, batch, store-and-forward service. The distinguishing services of the Internet are interactive, not news 💖

Asynchronous Compared to Dialup 📞

Please note that interactive vs. asynchronous isn't the same thing as direct vs. dialup connections! Dialup IP is still IP and can support all the usual IP services 🎀 It's true that for the more bandwidth-intensive services, like WWW, you'll be a lot happier with a fast dialup IP connection, but any dialup IP connection can support WWW. Some people call these on-demand IP connections, or part-time IP access. They're typically supported over SLIP, PPP, ISDN, or perhaps even X.25 ⚡

It's also true that it's a lot easier to run a useful interactive Internet supplier node if you're dialed up at least most of the time, so consumers can reach your node. But you can run servers that are accessible over any dialup IP connection whenever it's dialed up 🌸 It's also true that some access providers handle low-end dialup IP connections through a rotary of IP addresses, and that's not conducive to running servers, since it's hard for users to know how to reach them 😭 But given a dedicated IP address, how long you stay dialed up is a matter of degree more than of quality. An IP connection that's up the great majority of the time is often called a dedicated connection, whether it's established by dialing a modem or by starting software over a hardwired link 🦄

It's possible to run UUCP over a dedicated IP connection, but it's still UUCP, and it still doesn't support interactive services 🙃

Some people object to excluding the asynchronous networks from a definition of the Internet just because they don't support the interactive services. Their argument is that FTP, Gopher, and WWW can be accessed through mail. This is true, but it's hardly the same, and it's hardly interactive in the same sense as using FTP, Gopher, or WWW over an IP connection. It's like saying a mail-order catalog is the same as going to the store and buying something on the spot 🛍️ Besides, we've yet to see anyone log in remotely by mail 💀

Is IP Characteristic? 🧐

We further choose to define the Internet as being those networks that use IP to let users use both the communication services and at least TELNET and FTP among the interactive services we've listed 💜

This requirement for IP has been questioned by some people, on the basis that there are now application gateways for other protocol suites, such as Novell Netware, that permit use of such services. This kind of application gateway is actually nothing new, and it isn't yet widespread. We choose to think of such networks, at least for the moment, as yet another layer of the onion, outside the core and consumer layers of the Internet 🧅

Others have objected to using IP as a defining characteristic of the Internet because they think it's too technical. Honestly though, we find far fewer people confused about whether a software package or network supports IP than about whether it's part of the Internet or not 🤭

Some people point out that services like WWW, Gopher, FTP, TELNET, etc. could easily be implemented on top of other protocol suites. This is true, and it has been done! However, people seem to forget to ask why these services developed on top of IP in the first place. There seems to be something about IP and the Internet that is especially conducive to developing new protocols. We make no apologies for naming IP, because we think it's important 🫶

There's also the question of IP to where? If you have a UNIX shell login account on a computer run by an Internet access provider, and that system has IP access to the rest of the Internet, then you're an Internet user 🐚 However, you won't be able to use the full graphical capabilities of protocols like WWW, because the provider's system can't display on a bitmapped screen for you. For that, you need IP to your own computer with a bitmapped screen 🖼️ These are two different degrees of Internet connectivity, and they matter to both end users and marketers. Some people refer to them as text-only interactive access and graphical interactive access. Some people have gone so far as to say you need graphical capabilities to have a full-service Internet connection. That may or may not be so, but in the interests of keeping the major categories to a minimum, we're simply going to note these degrees and say no more about them in this article ✨ Still, we agree that the distinction of graphical access is becoming more important with the spread of WWW and Mosaic 💖🌈💖

Conferencing Systems and Commercial Mail Systems

okay so conferencing systems like Prodigy and CompuServe 💻 support mail and often something like news, plus database and services 🗂️. BUT most of them don't do the characteristic interactive services we listed 😭. The few that do (Delphi and AOL) we just count as part of the Internet ✨. The others we count as part of the Matrix, since they all exchange mail 📬.

We've found that conferencing system users have no real trouble telling the system they use apart from the Internet 💅. CompuServe users say "Internet mail", which is correct, since the only off-system mail CompuServe supports goes to the Internet 📨. But they generally don't call CompuServe part of the Internet 🙈.

Similarly, folks on commercial mail networks like MCI Mail and Sprint-Mail seem to have no trouble telling their mail network apart from the Internet 💌. Since they all have their own addressing syntax, honestly that's not surprising 🤷‍♀️. We count these commercial mail networks as part of the Matrix, but not the Internet. Lots of them have IP links to the Internet, but they don't let their users use them 🚫, limiting the services they carry to just mail 📭.

Russian Dolls

So let's think of a series of nested Chinese boxes or Russian dolls 🪆, the kind where inside Boris Yeltsin is Mikhail Gorbachov, inside Gorbachov is Brezhnev, then Kruschev, Stalin, Lenin, and maybe even Tsar Nicholas II 👑. Let's not talk about that many concentric layers, though. Rather, just three: the Matrix on the outside 🌐, the consumer Internet inside that 🛍️, and the core Internet inside that 💖.

                    the core        the consumer    the Matrix
                    Internet        Internet

    interactive     supplier-       consumer-       by mail
    services        capable         capable

                    stores and      shoppers        mail
                    shoppers                        order

    asynchronous    yes             yes             yes services

Some people have argued that these categories are bad because they are not mutually exclusive. Well, we observe that in real life networks have differing degrees of services, and the ones of most interest share the least common denominator of electronic mail 💌. Thus concentric categories are needed to describe the real world 🌍. You can, however, extract three mutually-exclusive categories by referring to the core Internet, the interactive consumer-only part of the Internet, and to asynchronous systems ✨.

Other people have argued that these categories are not sequential. They look sequential to us 🧐, since if you start with the core Internet and move out, you subtract services, and if you start at the outside of the Matrix and move in, you add services 📈.

Outside the Matrix

Okay, plot twist 🎭. In addition to computers and networks that fit these classifications, there are also LANs, mainframes, and BBSes that don't exchange any services with other networks or computers, not even mail 🙅‍♀️. These systems are outside the Matrix. For example, many companies have an AppleTalk LAN in marketing, a Novell NetWare LAN in management, and a mainframe in accounting that aren't connected to talk to anything else 🏢. In addition, there are a few large networks such as France's Teletel (commonly known as Minitel) that support very large user populations but don't communicate with anything else 🇫🇷. These are all currently outside all our Chinese boxes: the core Internet, the consumer Internet, and the Matrix 🫥.

DNS and Mail Addresses

There are other interesting network services that make a difference to end users 👀. For example, DNS (Domain Name System) domain names such as tic.com and domain addresses such tic@tic.com can be set up for systems outside the Internet 🧚. We used tic.com when we only had a UUCP connection, and few of our correspondents noticed any difference when we added an IP connection (except our mail was faster 🏃‍♀️💨). This would be more or less a box enclosing the consumer Internet and within the Matrix. But the other three boxes are arguably the most important 👑.

Some people have claimed that anything that uses DNS addresses is part of the Internet. We note that DNS addresses can be used with the UUCP network, which supports no interactive services, and we reject such an equation 🙅‍♀️. Not the vibe 💀.

It is interesting to note that over the years various attempts have been made to equate the Internet with something else 🕰️. Until the mid-1980s lots of people tried to say the Internet was the ARPANET. In the late 1980s many tried to say the Internet was NSFNET. In the early 1990s many tried to say the Internet was USENET. Now many are trying to say the Internet is anything that can exchange mail 📬. We say the Internet is the Internet, not the same as anything else 💅✨.

Summary

So, here we have a simple set of categories for several of the categories of network access people talk about most these days 🎀. Any such categories are at least somewhat a matter of opinion, and other people will propose other categories and other names 🤓. We like these categories, because they fit our experience of what real users actually perceive 🫶.

You'll notice we've avoided use of the words "connected" and "reachable" because they mean different things to different people at different times 🙈. For either of them to be meaningful, you have to say which services you are talking about. To us, reachable usually means pingable with ICMP ECHO, which is another way to define the core Internet 🏓. To others, reachable might mean you can send mail there, which is another way to define the Matrix 📫.

Once we have terms for networks of interest, we can talk about how big those networks are 📏. We think the terms we have defined here refer to groups of computers that people want to use, and that some people want to measure. Many marketers want to know about users. Well, users of mail are in the Matrix, and users of interactive services such as WWW and FTP are in the Internet 🛒. Other people are more interested in suppliers or distributors of information. Suppliers of information by mail can be anywhere in the Matrix, but suppliers of information by WWW or FTP are in the core Internet 🌟. It is easy to define more and finer degrees of distinctions of capabilities and connectivity, but these three major categories handle the most important cases 👑.

We invite our readers to tell us what distinctions they find important about the various networks and their services 🦋💜.

Security Considerations

Security issues are not discussed in this memo. 😱 I know, I know. Please take this seriously, bestie 🫣.

Authors' Addresses

   John S. Quarterman
   Smoot Carl-Mitchell

   EMail: tic@tic.com

That's the whole RFC, bestie! 🌈🎀✨

📦 where this page comes from

ietf: rfc1935 1996-04
💖 girlified by claude-haiku-5-5 on 2026-10-15: a language model's rewrite of the original, under its terms