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I'm really confused. After reading about SOPA and ways to bypass any SOPA firewall, I found out about the usenet. That made me realize that... I have no idea how the internet works.

I understand that there's a heirarchy - you have machines connected to a router connected to a local hub connected to... bigger hubs. But... I don't really understand what it is that ISPs do? Surely you should pay whoever owns the "hub", and as such you wouldn't be able to choose an ISP, it would be completely based on where you're located geographically? I don't think that's the case though? (also: relation with cable providers?)

And what about DNS servers: They turn website addresses into IP addresses right? How is it possible that there are a crapton of different DNS servers? Wouldn't it be too difficult to synchronize them, and so one DNS server would have a bunch of different URLs from another?

And what about usenet? Could you connect to a usenet server without being signed up with an ISP?

Since I have a lot of questions... is there a book or online thing I can read that can give me interwebz answers?

http://computer.howstuffworks.com/internet/basics/internet.htm

there's hundreds if not thousands of sites out there with this info

At the very start you basically funded the creation of this network with your monthly (or per minute) fees.

Now it's practically done... and you still need to pay.

The case with ISP's is that it all comes down to one fat-ass company all around the world, with many smaller companies built around itself. I'm not making this up, i'm over half a dozen providers, and it all said they use T-Online's network (or whatever)... capitalism kinda reached its goal in this area. You know, that at the end one big company will own everything. (Oups, sorry the official view is the competition and free flow of funds... my bad..)

T-Online is big in Germany and the UK, but that's a small part of the internet.

The idea behind the internet is that every machine on the network is a peer, and all peers have equal access to eachother, limited by available bandwidth.

DNS is a hierarchical structure, but the Internet itself is not. DNS has top level domains, like .com, .net, .org, and they work with lower level providers that distributes all the works, in a pyramid like fashion.

When you look up a domain name, it goes to your local providers dns server, that server then forwards the request on to a higher-level server and so on until something is returned or it's run out of places to check.

TCP/IP is the underlying communications protocol that most equipment on the internet uses. TCP/IP is not a heirarchy structure. It's agnostic and sends packets along a "best path" as determined by the router it's currently passing through.

This is why service providers like comcast that want to cap bandwidth, block protocols and ports are extremely dangerous to the internet. They make it so that there is no peer-to-peer relationship, but a master/slave or server/client relationship. You the customer are the client and never the server. This is against the spirit of the internet and why it's so great. Companies that want to package the Internet like they package cable TV stations are dangerous. Bills like SOPA/PROTECT-IP that wants to mess with the DNS infrastructure and kill user generated content are dangerous to our Internet.

*Note, there is a bit of a heirchy when it comes to you and your providers gaining access to backbone lines, but the packets themselves that flow over these lines ignore this heirchy, at least, in a perfect world.

Wow. Just... Wow.

Of course, it's all solid-state hardware with infinite capacity that never wears out, never breaks down, never needs upgrading, never needs software/firmware maintenance, never needs monitoring and never needs data maintenance

... and how the heck you managed to get to one company owning the Internet, I'll never know.

@Neuro Fuzzy,
There are 100's if not 1000's of large networking companies worldwide with peering agreements with other network companies. These in turn have peering agreements with ISP's, and these ISP's may in turn have agreements with other ISP's.

As a (very) simplified picture, you have your home network, connected to your ISP via broadband most likely. That connection will generally be to some sort of regional network (in the UK, it may be a network within your local BT exchange), which is connected to the national network (the BT backbone), which then connects to your ISP's internal networks, which in turn connect to either other ISP's (for national traffic) or to international carriers. That international traffic may connect through zero or more other international carriers, back to an ISP, through the ISP's networks (in a reversal of the ISP traffic described earlier), and finally to the targeted server.

Of course, those target ISP's may be companies with their own private networks and not public at all (think IBM or AT&T).

Basically, it's connected groups of networks at pretty much every level.

And.... once it's working, no one should be allowed to make any profit from it. That way, they can never grow, create new products and services, or hire more people. Those are all bad things that rich people do!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sDA1HUmuuJo&feature=related

This just sprung to mind lol

Keep in mind that there is a substancial difference between the terms Internet and World Wide Web, although it seems nowadays that people interchange the two. There is much more to the Internet than WWW or WWW2 just as there are numerous protocols HTTP, FTP, for instance.

Before my first actual ISP which I believe was Compuserve, then a brief stint with a free text only ISP through my local library, and then AOL. User groups or even local friends would run BBS's. This meant dialing their specific number, limited amount of connections (I can remember waiting hours to get on), and high cost phone bills especially if I needed to hit a BBS long distance.

Anways, I have a book that I can reference to get more of this right,, discussing other parts of the Internet (from the past & current) such as Usenet, Archie, Veronica, Gopher... The history of packet switching networks,, ARPAnet is interesting... though... Do I understand it all? Absolutely Not!!! It was a confusing world before WWW, perhaps just as confusing as it is today.

Regardless of how the government tries to regulate the WWW it would seem impossible to me for that regulation and filtering to spread to networks like IRC w/ Fservers, FreedomNet for starters.