How big is the Internet??
Discussion
How's this for a useless statistic?
Taking my very rough estimate of the Internet being about 2,048,000,000,000,000,000 KB...
That's 2.097152 x 10[21] bytes.
That's enough memory to store a single image of 69,905,100,000 x 10,000,000,000 pixels.
At a normal-ish resolution, that's a printable image of 7,355 miles x 1,052 miles - which is an area about a million square miles greater than the surface area of Russia.
Taking my very rough estimate of the Internet being about 2,048,000,000,000,000,000 KB...
That's 2.097152 x 10[21] bytes.
That's enough memory to store a single image of 69,905,100,000 x 10,000,000,000 pixels.
At a normal-ish resolution, that's a printable image of 7,355 miles x 1,052 miles - which is an area about a million square miles greater than the surface area of Russia.
Edited by evenflow on Friday 2nd October 10:43
CyprusCraig said:
Where does it all go?
Does anyone own the Internet?
Nobody owns the internet but the sale of domain names is regulated by a body called Nominet, a non-profit Company which has members who act as shareholders.Does anyone own the Internet?
It is tangible as the internet itself is essentially just the interconnection of all servers.
evenflow said:
CyprusCraig said:
In terms of storage (MB,GB,TB etc..)
How big do you think the internet is?
Is there any actual limit to how much can be uploaded?
Where does it all go?
Does anyone own the Internet?
As of July 2008, Google had indexed 1,000,000,000,000 (one trilion) unique URLs. How big do you think the internet is?
Is there any actual limit to how much can be uploaded?
Where does it all go?
Does anyone own the Internet?
Let's say a typical page might be 20KB, plus a bit for images (say 100KB per page), plus other media such as videos (average it out at say 1MB per page). I make that:
1,000,000,000,000 x 20 x 100 x 1024 = 2,048,000,000,000,000,000 KB (about 1,953,125,000,000 GB)
In terms of a limit, as long as people keep buying servers with memory, then no, there is no limit.
The information is held on web servers.
No one "owns" it as such. The content may be owned by the content provider (eg images and text on The Times site) and the intellectual property of the code that runs the sites may be owned by the software developer that wrote it.
Edited by evenflow on Thursday 1st October 20:55
ETA: On that estimation, on a 2MB broadband line, it would take yuo 31,709,791 years to download it.
Edited by evenflow on Thursday 1st October 20:59
Hell.
Thats impressive that is!
In terms of 'who owns it' - the important thing is that you own the bits that are yours 
I own my bits, even though they are incredibly small (I don't have much in the way of web content, it's the domain names that I use for email that are important to me, being a primary communications medium for me nowadays).
There are people who spend a lot of time trying to own other peoples' bits of the internet. These people are bad and irritating. You can normally spot them because they tend not to talk about owning someone's domain / server / box / etc. - but instead talk about 0wning it, or even pwning it. Most of them can't talk properly, but they are still a pain.
You could, therefore, ask the question 'who 0wns the internet' or 'who pwns the Internet'...
As to how big it is, it's BIG. But it's the only thing that has forced me to change my favourite phrase '95% of everything is bulls
t' since it's wrong if applied to the Internet. More than 99% of the content on the Internet is useless rubbish. It's down to how utterly huge the internet is that the less than 1% just happens to approach containing pretty much all human knowledge. The internet is pretty cool, really 
I own my bits, even though they are incredibly small (I don't have much in the way of web content, it's the domain names that I use for email that are important to me, being a primary communications medium for me nowadays).There are people who spend a lot of time trying to own other peoples' bits of the internet. These people are bad and irritating. You can normally spot them because they tend not to talk about owning someone's domain / server / box / etc. - but instead talk about 0wning it, or even pwning it. Most of them can't talk properly, but they are still a pain.
You could, therefore, ask the question 'who 0wns the internet' or 'who pwns the Internet'...
As to how big it is, it's BIG. But it's the only thing that has forced me to change my favourite phrase '95% of everything is bulls
t' since it's wrong if applied to the Internet. More than 99% of the content on the Internet is useless rubbish. It's down to how utterly huge the internet is that the less than 1% just happens to approach containing pretty much all human knowledge. The internet is pretty cool, really I don't know how big it is, but I found the end of it - http://www.endoftheinternet.com/
evenflow said:
ETA: On that estimation, on a 2MB broadband line, it would take yuo 31,709,791 years to download it.
No way would it take that long. Though you ignored the packet header overhead in you equation you also ignored the fact that 2MB will be inconceivable in 31 million years time.I predict that by 2112 assuming a 20% pa increase in content that we'll be able to download the whole internet in less a million years.
You heard it here first.
Put it this way:
It's big enough to prompt the creation of IPv6, which is a new generation protocol for host addressing, because the number of available IP addresses based on the current protocol (IPv4; XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX) is going to run out within the next few years.
IPv4 supports over 4 billion possible combinations.
IPv6 will support over 340 sextillion (36 zeros) unique addresses.
It's big enough to prompt the creation of IPv6, which is a new generation protocol for host addressing, because the number of available IP addresses based on the current protocol (IPv4; XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX) is going to run out within the next few years.
IPv4 supports over 4 billion possible combinations.
IPv6 will support over 340 sextillion (36 zeros) unique addresses.
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