The internet is a global ‘network of networks’, allowing computers around the world to communicate with each other. This network has been in existence since the late 1960s. In the early 1990s a new language for accessing information on this network was created: Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). This allowed the creation of web pages as we now know them.

A crucial feature of these pages is the ability to move from one to another very simply, by clicking on a hyperlink. This allows for easy navigation between web pages, which are linked together to collectively make up the World Wide Web. The ease of access which this enabled facilitated the rapid expansion of the internet, and its development from a military and research tool into a form of mass communication and commerce. It is hard accurately to measure the true scale of the web, but one estimate in February 2007 suggested it comprised nearly 30 billion pages, on 109 million distinct websites.
Each computer on the internet has an IP address (for example, 123.4.5.678), a numerical equivalent to a telephone number. Since IP numbers are hard to remember, the addressing system has a second element, the domain name system (DNS), which uses names such as ‘www.oft.gov.uk’. One or more domain names can be associated with a particular IP address. The association of IP addresses and domain names allows a user to easily access a website in its physical location on a computer, on a network.
The network is operated by Internet Service Providers (ISPs), who have arrangements to exchange communications between one another. The domain name system is managed by international, regional and national bodies. In the UK, Nominet is responsible for registering ‘.uk’ domain names.