Everyone knows about the Internet. Few, however, understand how it ticks. Very few people know where the standards come from that shape how the Internet works. These rules come from five groups, four of them loosely organized and consisting primarily of volunteers. The groups don t issue standards in the traditional sense, although their conclusions become the regulations by which the Internet operates worldwide. Instead, they agree on how things should be through discussion. The result is a surprisingly effective, if sometimes convoluted, system for dealing with the fast-growing and often unpredictable nature of the Internet. Like the Internet itself, the groups that oversee it have been recent innovations that continue to evolve and restructure.

The Internet links thousands of networks and millions of users who communicate using hundreds of different types of software. It is able to do so because of TCP/IP, the general procedure for accurately exchanging packets of data adopted by ARPANET in the early 1980s. Other networks soon adopted TCP/IP as well, thus paving the way for the global Internet of today. TCP/IP has been updated several times. It continues to undergo modifications, including those designed to speed throughput, especially for long-terrestrial and satellite links.