As per Relevance of the word networks, we have this rfc below:
Network Working Group J.
Request For Comments: 1935 S. Carl-
Category: Informational
April 1996
What is the Internet, Anyway
Status of This
This memo provides information for the Internet community. This
does not specify an Internet standard of any kind. Distribution
this memo is unlimited
Copyright (c) 1994
From Matrix News, 4(8), August 1994
Permission is hereby granted for redistribution of this
provided that it is redistributed in its entirety,
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/
A shorter version of this article appeared in MicroTimes
We often mention the Internet, and in the press you read about
Internet as the prototype of the Information Highway; as a
tool; as open for business; as not ready for prime time; as a
your children might communicate with (pick one) a. strangers, b
teachers, c. pornographers, d. other children, e. their parents;
bigger than Poland; as smaller than Chicago; as a place to surf;
the biggest hype since Woodstock; as a competitive business tool;
the newest thing since sliced bread
A recent New York Times article quoting one of us as to the
size of the Internet has particularly stirred up quite a ruckus.
exact figures attributed to John in the article are not the ones
recommended for such use, but the main point of contention is
the Internet is, as the gist of the article said, smaller than
other estimates have said. Clearly lots of people really want
believe that the Internet is very large. Succeeding discussion
shown that some want to believe that so much that they want to
computers and people that are probably *going to be* connected
time in the future, even if they are not actually connected now.
prefer to talk about who is actually on the Internet and on
networks now. We'll get back to the sizes of the various
later, but for now let's discuss a more basic issue that is at
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RFC 1935 What is the Internet, Anyway? April 1996
heart of much confusion and contention about sizes: what is
Internet, anyway
Starting at the
For real confusion, start trying to get agreement on what is part
the Internet: NSFNET? CIX? Your company's internal network
Prodigy? FidoNet? The mainframe in accounting? Some people
include all of the above, and perhaps even consider
anything politically incorrect. Others have cast doubts on each
the above
Let's start some place almost everyone would agree is on
Internet. Take RIPE, for example. The acronym stands for
IP Networks. RIPE is a coordinating group for IP networking
Europe. (IP is the Internet protocol, which is the basis of
Internet. IP has a suite of associated protocols, including
Transmission Control Protocol, or TCP, and the name IP, or
TCP/IP, is often used to refer to the whole protocol suite.) RIPE'
computers are physically located in Amsterdam. The important
of RIPE for our purposes is that you can reach RIPE (usually by
its domain, ripe.net) from just about anywhere anyone would agree
on the Internet
Reach it with what? Well, just about any service anyone would
is related to the Internet. RIPE has a WWW (World Wide Web) server
a Gopher server, and an anonymous FTP server. So they
documents and other resources by hypertext, menu browsing, and
retrieval. Their personnel use client programs such as Mosaic
Lynx to access other people's servers, too, so RIPE is a
distributor and a consumer of resources via WWW, Gopher, and FTP
They support TELNET interfaces to some of their services, and
course they can TELNET out and log in remotely anywhere they
personal login accounts or someone else has an anonymous
service such a library catalog available. They also have
mail, they run some mailing lists, and some of their people read
post news articles to USENET newsgroups
WWW, Gopher, FTP, TELNET, mail, lists, and news: that's a
characteristic set of major Internet services. There are many
obscure Internet services, but it's pretty safe to say that
organization like RIPE that is reachable with all these services
on the Internet
Reachable from where? Russia first connected to the Internet
1992. For a while it was reachable from networks in the
Internet Exchange (CIX) and from various other networks, but not
NSFNET, the U.S. National Science Foundation network. At the time
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RFC 1935 What is the Internet, Anyway? April 1996
some people considered NSFNET so important that they didn't
Russia as reachable because it wasn't accessible through NSFNET
Since there are now several other backbone networks in the U.S.
fast (T3 or 45Mbps) as NSFNET, and routing through NSFNET isn't
restricted anymore, few people would make that distinction anymore
So for the moment let's just say reachable through NSFNET or
networks, and get back to services
Looking at
Many companies and other organizations run networks that
deliberately firewalled so that their users can get to servers
those at ripe.net, but nobody outside the company network can get
company hosts. A user of such a network can thus use WWW, Gopher
FTP, and TELNET, but cannot supply resources through these
to people outside the company. Since a network that is owned
operated by a company in support of its own operations is called
enterprise network, let's call these networks enterprise IP networks
since they typically use the Internet Protocol (IP) to support
services. Some companies integrate their enterprise IP networks
the Internet without firewalls, but most do use firewalls, and
are the ones that are of interest here, since they're the ones
one-way access to these Internet services. Another name for
enterprise IP network, with or without firewall, is an
Internet
For purposes of this distinction between suppliers and consumers,
doesn't matter whether the hosts behind the firewall access
beyond the firewall by direct IP and TCP connections from their
IP addresses, or whether they use proxy application gateways (such
SOCKS) at the firewall. In either case, they can use
services, but cannot supply them
So for services such as WWW, Gopher, FTP, and TELNET, we can draw
useful distinction between supplier or distributor computers such
those at ripe.net and consumer computers such as those
firewalled enterprise IP networks. It might seem more obvious to
producer computers and consumer computers, since those would be
clearly paired terms. However, the information distributed by
supplier computer isn't necessarily produced on that computer
within its parent organization. In fact, most of the information
the bigger FTP archive servers is produced elsewhere. So we
to say distributors and consumers. Stores and shoppers would
about as well, if you prefer
Even more useful than discussing computers that actually
suppliers or consumers right now may be a distinction
supplier-capable computers (not firewalled) and consumer-
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RFC 1935 What is the Internet, Anyway? April 1996
computers (firewalled). This is because a computer that is
supplying information right now may be capable of doing so as soon
someone puts information on it and tells it to supply it. That is
setting up a WWW, Gopher, or FTP server isn't very difficult;
less difficult than getting corporate permission to breach
firewall. Similarly, a computer may not be able to
resources by WWW, Gopher, at the moment, since client programs
those services usually don't come with the computer or its
software, but almost any computer can be made capable of doing so
adding some software. In both cases, once you've got the basic
network connection, adding capabilities for specific services
relatively easy
Let's call the non-firewalled computers the core Internet, and
core plus the consumer-capable computers the consumer Internet.
people have referred to these two categories as the Backbone
and the Internet Web. We find the already existing connotations
"Backbone" and "Web" confusing, so we prefer core Internet
consumer Internet
It's true that many companies with firewalls have one or
computers carefully placed at the firewall so that they can
resources. Company employees may be able to place resources on
servers, but they can't serve resources directly from their
computers. It's rather like having to reserve space on a
company delivery truck, instead of owning one yourself. If you'
talking about companies, yes, the company is thus fully on the
Internet, yet its users aren't as fully on the Internet as users
behind a firewall
If you're just interested in computers that can
information (maybe you're selling server software), that's a
smaller Internet than if you're interested in all the computers
can retrieve such information for their users (maybe you
information you want to distribute). A few years ago it
wouldn't have been hard to get agreement that firewalled
networks were a different kind of thing than the Internet itself
Nowadays, firewalls have become so popular that it's hard to find
enterprise IP network that is not firewalled, and the total number
hosts on such consumer-capable networks is probably almost as
as the number on the supplier-capable core of the Internet. So
people now like to include these consumer-capable networks along
the supplier-capable core when discussing the Internet
Some people claim that you can't measure the number of consumer
capable computers or users through measurements taken on the
itself. Perhaps not, but you can get an idea of how many
consumers there are by simply counting accesses to selected
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RFC 1935 What is the Internet, Anyway? April 1996
and comparing the results to other known facts about the
organizations. And there are other ways to get useful
about consumers on the Internet, including asking them
Mail, Lists, and
But what about mail, lists, and news? We carefully left those out
the discussion of firewalls, because almost all the
networks do let these communications services in and out, so there'
little useful distinction between firewalled and non-
networks on the basis of these services. That's because there's
big difference between these communications services and the
sharing (TELNET, FTP) and resource discovery (Gopher, WWW)
that firewalls usually filter. The communications services
normally batch, asynchronous, or store-and-forward.
characterizations mean more or less the same thing, so pick the
you like best. The point is that when you send mail, you compose
message and queue it for delivery. The actual delivery is a
process; it may take seconds or hours, but it is done after
finish composing the message, and you normally do not have to
for the message to be delivered before doing something else. It
not uncommon for a mail system to batch up several messages to
through a single network link or to the same destination and
deliver them all at once. And mail doesn't even necessarily go
its final destination in one hop; repeated storing at an
destination followed by forwarding to another computer is common
thus the term store-and-forward. Mailing lists are built on top
the same delivery mechanisms as regular electronic mail. USENET
uses somewhat different delivery mechanisms, but ones that are
typically batch, asynchronous, and store-and-forward. Because it
delivered in this manner, a mail message or a news article is
less likely to be a security problem than a TELNET, FTP, Gopher,
WWW connection. This is why firewalls usually pass mail, lists,
news in both directions, but usually stop incoming connections
those interactive protocols
Because WWW, Gopher, TELNET, and FTP are basically interactive,
need IP or something like it to support them. Because mail, lists
and news are asynchronous, you can support them with protocols
are not interactive, such as UUCP and FidoNet. In fact, there
whole networks that do just that, called UUCP and FidoNet,
others. These networks carry mail and news, but are not capable
supporting TELNET, FTP, Gopher, or WWW. We don't consider them
of the Internet, since they lack the most distinctive
characteristic services of the Internet
Some people argue that networks such as FidoNet and UUCP should
be counted as being part of the Internet, since electronic mail
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RFC 1935 What is the Internet, Anyway? April 1996
the most-used service even on the core, supplier-capable Internet
They further argue that the biggest benefit of the Internet is
community of discussion it supports, and mail is enough to join that
Well, if mail is enough to be on the Internet, why is the
drawing such attention from press and new users alike? Mail has
around for quite a while (1972 or 1973), but that's not what has
such an impression on the public. What has is the
services, and interfaces to them such as Mosaic.
networks such as FidoNet and UUCP don't support those
services, and are thus not part of the Internet. Besides, if
part of a community of discussion was enough, we would have to
include anyone with a fax machine or a telephone. Recent events
demonstrated that all readers of the New York Times would also
to be included. With edges so vague, what would be the point
calling anything the Internet? We choose to stick with a
of the Internet as requiring the interactive services
Some people argue that anything that uses RFC-822 mail is
using Internet mail and must be part of the Internet. We find
about as plausible as arguing that anybody who flies in a Boeing 737
is using American equipment and is thus within the United States
Besides, there are plenty of systems out there that use mail but
RFC-822.
So what to call systems that can exchange mail, but aren't on
Internet? We say they are part of the Matrix, which is all
systems worldwide that can exchange electronic mail. This term
borrowed (with permission) from Bill Gibson, the science
writer
Other people refer to the Matrix as global E-mail. That's accurate
but is a description, rather than a name. Some even call it the e
mail Internet. We find that term misleading, since if a system
only exchange mail, we don't consider it part of the Internet.
to mention not everything in the world defines itself in terms of
Internet, or communicates through the Internet. FidoNet and WWIVnet
for example, have gateways between themselves that have nothing to
with the Internet. Referring to the Matrix as the Internet is
like referring to the United Kingdom as England. You may call
convenient shorthand; the Scots may disagree
What about news? Well, the set of all systems that exchange
already has a name: USENET. USENET is presumably a subset of
Matrix, since it's hard to imagine a USENET node without mail,
though USENET itself is news, not mail. USENET is clearly not
same thing as the Internet, since many (almost certainly most
Internet nodes do not carry USENET news, and many USENET nodes are
other networks, especially UUCP, FidoNet, and BITNET
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RFC 1935 What is the Internet, Anyway? April 1996
A few years ago it was popular in some corners of the press
attempt to equate USENET and the Internet. They're clearly not
same. News, like mail, is an asynchronous, batch, store-and-
service. The distinguishing services of the Internet
interactive, not news
Asynchronous Compared to
Please note that interactive vs. asynchronous isn't the same thing
direct vs. dialup connections. Dialup IP is still IP and can
all the usual IP services. It's true that for the more bandwidth
intensive services such as 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
access. They're typically supported over SLIP, PPP, ISDN, or
even X.25.
It's also true that it's a lot easier to run a useful
Internet supplier node if you're at least dialed up most of the
so that consumers can reach your node, but you can run servers
are accessible over any dialup IP connection whenever it's dialed up
It's true that some access providers handle low-end dialup
connections through a rotary of IP addresses, and that's
conducive to running servers, since it's difficult for users to
how to reach them. But given a dedicated IP address, how long
stay dialed up is a matter of degree more than of quality. A
connection that's up the great majority of the time is often called
dedicated connection regardless of whether it's established
dialing a modem or starting software over a hardwired link
It's possible to run UUCP over a dedicated IP connection, but it'
still UUCP, and still does not support interactive services
Some people object to excluding the asynchronous networks from
definition of the Internet just because they don't support
interactive services. The argument they make is that FTP, Gopher
and WWW can be accessed through mail. This is true, but it's
the same, and hardly interactive in the same sense as using FTP
Gopher, or WWW over an IP connection. It's rather like saying
mail-order catalog is the same as going to the store and buying
item on the spot. Besides, we've yet to see anyone log in
by mail
Is IP Characteristic
We further choose to define the Internet as being those networks
use IP to permit users to use both the communication services and
least TELNET and FTP among the interactive services we have listed
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RFC 1935 What is the Internet, Anyway? April 1996
This requirement for IP has been questioned by some on the basis
there are now application gateways for other protocol suites such
Novell Netware that permit use of such services. This kind
application gateway is actually nothing new, and is not
widespread. We choose to think of such networks, at least for
moment, as yet another layer of the onion, outside the core
consumer layers of the Internet
Others have objected to the use of IP as a defining characteristic
the Internet because they think it's too technical. Actually,
find far fewer people confused about whether a software package
network supports IP than about whether it's part of the Internet
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 has been done. However, people seem to forget
ask why these services developed on top of IP in the first place
There seems to be something about IP and the Internet that
especially conducive to the development of new protocols. We make
apologies about naming IP, because we think it is important
There is also the question of IP to where? If you have a UNIX
login account on a computer run by an Internet access provider,
that system has IP access to the rest of the Internet, then you
an Internet user. However, you will not be able to use the
graphical capabilities of protocols such as WWW, because
provider's system cannot display on a bitmapped screen for you.
that, you need IP to your own computer with a bitmapped screen
These are two different degrees of Internet connectivity that
important to both end users and marketers. Some people refer to
as text-only interactive access and graphical interactive access
Some people have gone so far as to say you have to have
capabilities to have a full service Internet connection. That may
may not be so, but in the interests of keeping the major
to a minimum, we are simply going to note these degrees and say
more about them in this article. However, we agree that
distinction of graphical access is becoming more important with
spread of WWW and Mosaic
Conferencing Systems and Commercial Mail
Conferencing systems such as Prodigy and CompuServe that support
and often something like news, plus database and services. But
of them do not support the characteristic interactive services
we have listed. The few that do (Delphi and AOL), we simply count
part of the Internet. The others, we count as part of the Matrix
since they all exchange mail
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RFC 1935 What is the Internet, Anyway? April 1996
We find that users of conferencing systems have no
difficulty in distinguishing between the conferencing system they
and the Internet. CompuServe users, for example, refer to "
mail", which is correct, since the only off-system mail
supports is to the Internet, but they do not in general refer
CompuServe as part of the Internet
Similarly, users of the various commercial electronic mail networks
such as MCI Mail and Sprint-Mail, seem to have no difficulty
distinguishing between the mail network they use and the Internet
Since they all seem to have their own addressing syntax, this
hardly surprising. We count these commercial mail networks as
of the Matrix, but not part of the Internet. Many of them have
links to the Internet, but they don't let their users use them
instead limiting the services they carry to just mail
Russian
So let's think of a series of nested Chinese boxes or Russian dolls
the kind where inside Boris Yeltsin is Mikhail Gorbachov,
Gorbachov is Brezhnev, then Kruschev, Stalin, Lenin, and maybe
Tsar Nicholas II. Let's not talk about that many concentric layers
though, rather just three: the Matrix on the outside, the
Internet inside, and the core Internet inside that
the core the consumer the
Internet
interactive supplier- consumer- by
services capable
stores and shoppers
shoppers
asynchronous yes yes yes
Some people have argued that these categories are bad because
are not mutually exclusive. Well, we observe that in real
networks have differing degrees of services, and the ones of
interest share the least common denominator of electronic mail.
concentric categories are needed to describe the real world.
can, however, extract three mutually-exclusive categories
referring to the core Internet, the interactive consumer-only part
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
and move out, you subtract services, and if you start at the
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RFC 1935 What is the Internet, Anyway? April 1996
of the Matrix and move in, you add services
Outside the
In addition to computers and networks that fit these classifications
there are also LANs, mainframes, and BBSes that don't exchange
services with other networks or computers; not even mail.
systems are outside the Matrix. For example, many companies have
AppleTalk LAN in marketing, a Novell NetWare LAN in management, and
mainframe in accounting that aren't connected to talk to
else. In addition, there are a few large networks such as France'
Teletel (commonly known as Minitel) that support very large
populations but don't communicate with anything else. These are
currently outside all our Chinese boxes of the core Internet,
consumer Internet, and the Matrix
DNS and Mail
There are other interesting network services that make a
to end users. For example, DNS (Domain Name System) domain
such as tic.com and domain addresses such tic@tic.com can be set
for systems outside the Internet. We used tic.com when we only had
UUCP connection, and few of our correspondents noticed any
when we added an IP connection (except our mail was faster).
would be more or less a box enclosing the consumer Internet
within the Matrix. But the other three boxes are arguably the
important
Some people have claimed that anything that uses DNS addresses
part of the Internet. We note that DNS addresses can be used
the UUCP network, which supports no interactive services, and
reject such an equation
It is interesting to note that over the years various attempts
been made to equate the Internet with something else. Until
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
early 1990s many tried to say the Internet was USENET. Now many
trying to say the Internet is anything that can exchange mail.
say the Internet is the Internet, not the same as anything else
So, here we have a simple set of categories for several of
categories of network access people talk about most these days.
such categories are at least somewhat a matter of opinion, and
people will propose other categories and other names. We like
categories, because they fit our experience of what real
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RFC 1935 What is the Internet, Anyway? April 1996
actually perceive
You'll notice we've avoided use of the words "connected"
"reachable" because they mean different things to different people
different times. For either of them to be meaningful, you have
say which services you are talking about. To us, reachable
means pingable with ICMP ECHO, which is another way to define
core Internet. To others, reachable might mean you can send
there, which is another way to define the Matrix
Once we have terms for networks of interest, we can talk about
big those networks are. We think the terms we have defined
refer to groups of computers that people want to use, and that
people want to measure. Many marketers want to know about users
Well, users of mail are in the Matrix, and users of
services such as WWW and FTP are in the Internet. Other people
more interested in suppliers or distributors of information
Suppliers of information by mail can be anywhere in the Matrix,
suppliers of information by WWW or FTP are in the core Internet.
is easy to define more and finer degrees of distinctions
capabilities and connectivity, but these three major
handle the most important cases
We invite our readers to tell us what distinctions they
important about the various networks and their services
Security
Security issues are not discussed in this memo
Authors'
John S.
Smoot Carl-
EMail: tic@tic.
Quarterman & Carl-Mitchell Informational [Page 11]
if you see any problems within the linking, don't worry be happy,
this is version 0.1 of the Relevance System and you gotta expect some crappy subroutines sometimes,
just be content we did not write this in Java, which would have made this "bigger and better" HAHAHHA.
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