A lot of people get confused over the difference between the internet and the World Wide Web. Aren’t they interchangable? Aren’t they the same thing?

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They aren’t, but the difference is largely ignored, and which ever term you use, most people know what you mean. Still, there is a difference, and for those who are interested, here’s the easiest way to remember the distinction that I’ve come across.

The internet is the network connecting online computers. Just like your home network, built around a modem and router, the internet is a series of routers and servers (computers that serve files and web pages) that form an international network of connected computers. In the 1970s and 80s the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) created the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), the means by which the vast majority of computers connect to and navigate the internet.

The World Wide Web is the content being offered on the internet. It consists of web pages, files, web services and applications. For example, Amazon is a part of the World Wide Web that you can access via the internet. Tim Berners-Lee invented the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) in 1990 as a means to link to documents and files stored in servers around the world connected to the internet.

Internet: a network of connected computers.

World Wide Web: the content you can access on the internet.