Internet Gambling - The Internet

Online gambling would not exist without the Internet. The Internet is a vast computer network including hundreds of millions of computers in more than a hundred countries. It is not operated by any one business or government but is a cooperative venture in which many companies, organizations, and individuals choose to participate by making their computers part of the network. The Internet has been evolving since the 1960s, when researchers at the U.S. Department of Defense began trying to link computers located far from each other. Today, the Internet is a vast network that allows computer users at various locations to share information and data and communicate with one another.

Special computers called routers communicate with each other and calculate the best route for data packets to take as they travel the network. Each computer connected to the Internet has a unique Internet protocol (IP) address. This is a numerical address (such as 140.147.248.209) that other computers use to identify it. In 1984 domain names were introduced to make the network more userfriendly. A domain name (like uscongress.gov) is the word equivalent of an IP address. However, an IP address is not a geographical address. It does not tell one computer exactly where another computer is physically located.

Accessing the Internet from a personal computer requires a means for connection, plus software through which to communicate. Connection is via phone lines, cable, radio waves, or satellite to a special-purpose computer, called a server or host system. These powerful computers, which are usually operated by companies called Internet service providers (ISPs), are in communication with each other throughout the network and provide the backbone of the Internet infrastructure.

The World Wide Web is an information system that makes the Internet easier to use. It is a special way to encode, retrieve, and navigate the many resources that are stored on Internet-linked computers. It is based on client-server inter-action. A Web server is a computer that knows where to find resources (given their address) and how to extract them when someone asks. The company or individual that maintains a particular Web site is called its webmaster.

In order to access a particular Web site, a software program such as Netscape or Internet Explorer is required. Every Web address has a syntax—for example, http://www.webpage.com—in which "http" stands for a specific set of communication rules that are used to exchange data, and "www" identifies the data as being on the World Wide Web. The remainder of the Web address is the domain name of the computer on which those data are stored.

Computer Industry Almanac, Inc., estimated that 955 million people worldwide had Internet access in 2004. That number is expected to grow to nearly 1.5 billion by the year 2007.