The Difference Between the Internet and the World Wide Web

When you "go online," you're using the Internet. When you visit a website, you're using the Web. These happen at the same moment, so they feel like the same thing.

They're not. The Web is just one thing happening on the Internet—and once you see this, the architecture of the digital world snaps into focus.

The Internet: Infrastructure

The Internet is every possible route between every connected device on Earth. Undersea cables. Fiber optic lines through cities. Wireless signals between towers. Routers choosing paths. Switches making connections.

It emerged from ARPANET in 1969, designed around a simple principle: no single point of failure. Every message finds its own path. If one route fails, data takes another. The network routes around damage.

The Internet doesn't care what it carries. It knows how to get data from one address to another using TCP/IP—the protocol that handles addressing, routing, and verification that packets arrived intact.

Infrastructure. Foundation. The roads themselves.

The Web: One Application

In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee needed a way for scientists at CERN to share documents. His solution combined three ideas:

HTML — A format for documents that could link to each other
HTTP — A protocol for requesting and delivering those documents
URLs — Addresses for locating documents anywhere on Earth

When you type a URL into a browser, you're speaking HTTP across the Internet to retrieve HTML. That's the Web. Not the roads—one specific type of traffic traveling on them.

The Web was just the first vehicle most people noticed on the highway—so they thought the highway was for that vehicle.

What Else Travels These Roads

Email doesn't use the Web. It uses SMTP, POP3, and IMAP—protocols older than HTTP, designed for a different purpose. You can email someone without a browser, without HTML, without anything "web."

Video games talking to servers. Netflix streaming video. A Zoom call connecting voices. Your smart thermostat reporting temperature. Your car sending diagnostics to the manufacturer.

All of these use the Internet. None of them are the Web.

The Internet existed for 20 years before the Web showed up. It will outlive whatever replaces the Web.

The Practical Distinction

The Internet is the fact of connection—the ability to reach another device anywhere on Earth.

The Web is one use of that connection—requesting and displaying linked documents through HTTP.

Email is another use. Gaming is another. Streaming is another. Each speaks its own protocol, travels the same infrastructure, serves different needs.

You can't browse the Web without the Internet. But you can absolutely use the Internet without touching the Web. Millions of devices do this every second—industrial sensors, payment terminals, satellites—communicating through protocols most people have never heard of.

Why It Matters

When someone says "the Internet is down," they might mean their router lost connection to their ISP—the roads are blocked. Or they might mean a website won't load—one application failed, but the roads are fine.

Understanding the distinction is diagnostic. If websites won't load but email works, the Internet is fine and the problem is HTTP-specific. If nothing works, the problem is lower in the stack—your connection to the infrastructure itself.

Your smart doorbell doesn't need "the Web" to function. It just needs the Internet to reach its servers. Your phone can send push notifications without any browser involved.

The Internet is the possibility of connection.

The Web is one thing we built on that possibility.

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