Internet vs World Wide Web: what's the difference?

The internet and the World Wide Web are not the same thing. The internet is the network: the cables, radio links, routers and shared rules, called TCP/IP, that let billions of devices exchange data. The World Wide Web is one service that runs on top of it: pages and files linked together by addresses, fetched with a browser. Email, video calls and online games also use the internet without being part of the web.

In short

• The internet carries data between computers. The web is a way of publishing and linking documents, carried by the internet.
• The internet was built over the 1960s to 1980s by many people; the web was invented by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in 1989–91.
• Every web page travels over the internet, but much of what travels over the internet is not the web.

What is the difference, in one picture?

A useful comparison is roads and shops. The internet is the road network: it gets traffic from any point to any other, and doesn't care what the vehicles carry. The web is one kind of business that uses the roads, a vast chain of shops whose shelves point you to other shops. Delivery vans, buses and ambulances use the same roads without being shops. That is how email, video calls and app traffic relate to the internet.

Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the web, draws the line the same way in his own FAQ: on the internet you find computers; on the web you find documents, sounds and videos. The web runs on programs that talk to each other over the internet, so it could not exist without it.

	The internet	The World Wide Web
What it is	A global network of networks	An information space of linked pages and files
Built from	Cables, fiber, radio, routers, and the TCP/IP protocols	Web addresses (URLs), the HTTP protocol, and pages written in HTML
Began	ARPANET in 1969; TCP/IP across ARPANET from 1 January 1983	Proposed in March 1989; public from 1991
Created by	Many researchers, including Leonard Kleinrock, Paul Baran, Donald Davies, Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn	Tim Berners-Lee at CERN, with Robert Cailliau
You use it through	Any connected app or device	A web browser, or apps that load web pages
Examples of what it carries	The web, email, video calls, online games, app data, DNS lookups	Websites, online shops, news articles, web apps

Where did the internet come from?

The internet has no single inventor. It grew from ideas about packet switching, splitting messages into small addressed chunks, developed in the 1960s by Leonard Kleinrock, Paul Baran at RAND and Donald Davies in Britain. ARPANET, funded by the U.S. Defense Department's research agency, sent its first host-to-host message from UCLA to the Stanford Research Institute in October 1969, according to the Internet Society's history, written by several of the people who built it.

ARPANET was one network among several. The breakthrough that made "inter-net" possible was a common language for joining networks: TCP/IP, designed by Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn from 1973. On 1 January 1983, ARPANET switched to TCP/IP in a single day. By the late 1980s universities around the world were connected, and commercial providers opened the internet to the public in the early 1990s. The step-by-step mechanics are in how the internet works.

Where did the web come from?

The web arrived two decades into the internet's story. In March 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist working at CERN, the European physics laboratory near Geneva, wrote a proposal titled Information Management: A Proposal. CERN's scientists used many incompatible computers and couldn't easily find each other's documents. His idea was a system of linked documents, hypertext, that worked across all of them over the internet that already connected them.

By the end of 1990 he had built the three pieces the web still runs on: URLs, addresses that name any document anywhere; HTTP, the protocol a browser uses to ask a server for a document; and HTML, the language pages are written in. He also wrote the first browser and the first web server, running on a NeXT computer. The first website, about the project itself, ran on that NeXT computer; CERN restored it in 2013, and it is online again at info.cern.ch. In August 1991 he announced the web publicly on internet newsgroups, and on 30 April 1993 CERN put the web's software in the public domain, so anyone could use and build on it without fees. Graphical browsers, Mosaic in 1993 and Netscape soon after, then took it to the public.

Timeline: the network first, the web on top

Year	Internet	Web
1961–67	Packet-switching ideas published
1969	First ARPANET message, UCLA to SRI
1973–74	Cerf and Kahn design TCP/IP
1983	ARPANET switches to TCP/IP on 1 January
1989		Berners-Lee's proposal at CERN, March
1990		First browser, server and web page
1991		The web announced publicly, August
1993		CERN releases the software freely, 30 April; Mosaic browser

What uses the internet but isn't the web?

A lot. The test is simple: is it a page or file fetched by a URL over HTTP? If not, it is using the internet but not the web.

• Email moves between mail servers with its own protocols, SMTP to send and IMAP or POP to collect. Reading Gmail in a browser uses the web for the reading part, but the message itself crosses the internet as email.
• Video and voice calls stream audio and video directly between devices or through call servers, using protocols built for real-time media.
• Online games exchange constant small updates with game servers.
• DNS, the internet's directory, turns names into numeric addresses before any web page can load.
• Messaging and many phone apps talk to their companies' servers directly, though many borrow web technology to do it.

A worked example: one web address, taken apart

Take the address of the first website: https://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html.

1. https names the protocol, HTTP with encryption. That part is the web.
2. info.cern.ch is a domain name. Your device asks DNS to turn it into an IP address, then the internet carries packets to that address. That part is the internet.
3. /hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html is the path. The web server at that address uses it to find the right document, written in HTML, and sends it back. That part is the web again.

The web decides what to ask for and what comes back; the internet decides how it gets there. The same split explains other web topics. Cookies are a web feature, carried in HTTP. Search engines index the web, not email or games. And the dark web is a set of websites reached through a special network that runs over the ordinary internet.

Does the difference matter?

In everyday speech, people say "the internet" for both, and nobody is confused about checking a site. The difference matters when something breaks or when a decision is made about one and not the other. If a messaging app works but websites won't load, the connection is fine and the problem lies with the browser, a web proxy setting or the site itself. Laws and policies, too, often target one layer: rules about cookies or website accessibility are web rules, while rules about broadband or network neutrality are internet rules.

It also corrects a common error about credit. No single person invented the internet. Berners-Lee invented the web, and is careful to say so: in his FAQ, asked whether he invented the internet, he answers "Sorry, not me": he was lucky enough to invent the web when the internet already existed, and points to Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn instead.

Check yourself

• Without looking back: name three things that use the internet but are not the web.
• In a web address, which part is handled by the internet and which by the web?
• Why is it wrong to name a single inventor of the internet, but right to name one for the web?

Sources

• Frequently asked questions by the Press, Tim BL — Tim Berners-Lee, World Wide Web Consortium, 1998
• Information Management: A Proposal — Tim Berners-Lee, CERN, 1989
• The birth of the Web — CERN
• The World Wide Web project, the first website — CERN, 1991
• Brief History of the Internet — Leiner, Cerf, Clark, Kahn, Kleinrock and others, Internet Society, 1997