Development of World Internet

Abstract

Looking at the history of world civilizations, humanity has progressed along with agricultural, industrial and information revolutions. Each of these industrial and technological revolutions has had great and profound impact on our way of production and life. Today, information technologies represented by the Internet are experiencing rapid changes with each passing day. They have become the leading power for the innovation-driven economic and social development. The world Internet development history is a cross-language, cross-national and cross-cultural history, a history in which all countries make joint effort and work together to build a community of shared future in cyberspace, and a history the integration of information technology innovation with industries. It is an important part of the history of world civilizations. Comprehensively considering technical innovation, industrial development, number of Internet users and situation change, we can divide the world Internet development into five stages: the birth of the Internet (1960s–1992); expansion and application of the Internet (1993–2000); popularization of the Internet (2000–2007); mobile Internet (2008–2016); Internet of Everything (2016–present).