It’s the 25th anniversary of the Web, not the Internet. It’s important to remember the difference.
I just posted at Medium.com about why it’s important to remember the difference between the Net and the Web. Here’s the beginning:
A note to NPR and other media that have been reporting on “the 25th anniversary of the Internet”: NO, IT’S NOT. It’s the 25th anniversary of the Web. The Internet is way older than that. And the difference matters.
The Internet is a set of protocols?—?agreements?—?about how information will be sliced up, sent over whatever media the inter-networked networks use, and reassembled when it gets there. The World Wide Web uses the Internet to move information around. The Internet by itself doesn’t know or care about Web pages, browsers, or the hyperlinks we’ve come to love. Rather, the Internet enables things like the World Wide Web, email, Skype, and much much more to be specified and made real. By analogy, the Internet is like an operating system, and the Web, Skype, and email are like applications that run on top of it.
This is not a technical quibble. The difference between the Internet and the Web matters more than ever for at least two reasons.
Categories: net neutrality, policy dw
