The Internet is a network of interconnected networks covering almost the whole world, which share a common way of transferring data (the Internet protocol). Most people connect to the Internet through an Internet Service Provider or ISP. ISP's are in general connected to other ISP's through a fast backbone network provided by the big telecommunication companies.

The Internet Protocol just takes care that the data you want to send to another computer on the Internet, such as an email or a request for a web page, is transferred to the correct address on the Internet. Each computer connected to the Internet therefore needs a unique Internet address (which is just a number) and the computers on the Internet responsible for forwarding Internet traffic (called routers) keep a list of Internet addresses that they have encountered in previous Internet traffic, so they know in which direction on the network a particular Internet address is likely to be found.

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