Internet

Sri Lanka, May 24 -- Before presenting what Internet Society is, it is time to speak a little about Internet itself. Internet is made by interconnecting networks and these networks use mainly two protocols which are known as Transmission Control Protocol or popularly known as TCP and Internet Protocol or IP which are available free in the public domain. In other words, these are not propriety protocols with royalties.

What is a protocol one may ask? A Protocol is a standard something which is similar to grammar in a language. When we speak to each other, if the other person totally unknown to you can understand what each other says it is due to grammar.

Today many identify Internet as Web, though it is only a resource on the Internet. Email, File Transfer Protocol (FTP) and World Wide Web (www) are some of the common resources on the internet. Due to loosely coupled architecture of internet, no one controls internet or owns internet.

When a host connects to Internet through an Internet Service Provider by way of a fixed line, through mobile network or a dial-up, that host becomes part of the Internet.

As mentioned earlier, Internet is a network of networks and networks are made of hosts or computers or digital devices such as mobile phones; even some household items such as refrigerators have the ability to connect to Internet today.

All of these hosts are identified on the Internet with a particular address which is similar to a postal address though made up of 'bits' since digital devices think in binary numbers. The Internet is at crossroads due to the exhaustion of presently used addresses.

These addresses are known as IP version 4 or 32 bit addresses; due to its 32 bits, the maximum number of addresses one could have is limited to 4 billion (the number is less than the total population of the world) and by the time this article is written, the IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) which is responsible for IP addresses and one of those loosely coupled organizations important for Internet, has run out of the 32 bit addresses.

IANA has issued a statement stating that the last of these address blocks has been released to the relevant regional organizations. The Internet will transit from 32 bit addresses to 128 bit addresses in toto.

These are known as IP version 6 though some of the hosts have already been allocated 128 bit addresses.

The world had been getting ready for this eventuality for many years and many tests had been carried out to find out whether major networks of the world were ready for this transition and it is expected that the Internet will cross over from the 32 bit address space to 128 bit address space without even a single user knowing this.

Internet Top Level Domain (TLD) and Country Code Top Level Domains (ccTLD)

Since the Internet addresses are made of numbers, humans find it difficult to remember them. Humans think in words rather than in odd-looking numbers which are separated by dots.

Each of these numbers is translated and stored dynamically by servers which are known as Domain Name Service Servers or DNS servers. These servers are known also as look-up servers. Many of us speak of .com, .org, .mil, .net, .gov and they are known as generic Top Level Domains or gTLDs.

Although some of the gTLD remained fixed for some time after the initial introduction, a new set of gTLD has been added after 2000 and is popularly used: .aero, .biz, .museum, .asia etc.

.lk, .uk, .jp and .us are known as Country Code Top Level Domains or ccTLD. Sri Lanka obtained its domain in 1990 and it celebrated its 20th year in June 2010.

Sri Lanka achieved a major milestone in 2010 as the seventh country in the world to have its domain names in both its official languages (Sinhala and Tamil) and the first in the world to get approval for two languages at the TLD level.

Internet today has more non-English speaking or Non-Roman Script users than the ones who speak English.

Most of these users come from South East Asia - from countries like China, South Korea, Taiwan and Japan. Having Internationalized the Domain Names Service (IDNS), Sri Lanka has shown that she can technically stand shoulder to shoulder with other technically advanced nations such as the USA, Germany and Japan.

Published by HT Syndication with permission from Daily News Sri Lanka.

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