Sometime this month, Reddit will go public at a valuation of $6.5bn. Select Redditors were offered the chance to buy stock at the initial listing price, which it hasn’t announced yet but is expected to be in the range of $31-34 per share. Regardless of the actual price,
Will we ever stop referring to the Web as “the Internet”?
To be fair, the definition is a bit muddier nowadays. Is Lemmy on the Web? I don’t use it via the website. Bulletin boards used to not be part of the Web, as they pre-date the Web. But nowadays everything is HTTP. There’s so little non-web left, and the vast majority of users never use it, that the Internet is only used for accessing the Web.
BitTorrent is a pretty big part of the Internet though.
But it’s not muddy though. The Internet is the infrastructure that the web runs across. And there are still plenty of other protocols out there beside the web that are in use every single day. Even if the average user were to primarily use the Internet for accessing the web, it doesn’t mean the definitions of the two have become muddy. Interstate 4 is not Walt Disney World, even if you only ever drive I-4 to get to Disney.
The thing is: what people call the Internet is not the infrastructure. It’s the content on the Internet. There’s the technical term “Internet” and there’s the coloquial term. Unfortunately, engineers and scientists suck at naming and explaining things at the level that the general population can understand. So “the Internet” became synonymous with “content on the Internet”, be it Web content, torrents, bbs and what not.
No.
Whats the difference?
Think of the Internet as the US Interstate Highway system. The web is a chain of tourist attractions you can visit along those roads.
The Internet is the physical and logical collection of interconnected networks. The web is a protocol that runs on top of that infrastructure, just as email, ssh, ftp, irc, etc. do.
Given there’s people in this thread incorrectly using “internet” instead of “web”… Probably never.