The World-Wide Web began in March 1989, when Tim Berners-Lee of the European Particle Physics Laboratory (known as CERN, a collective of European high-energy physics researchers) proposed the project to be used as a means of transporting research and ideas effectively throughout the organization. Effective communications was a goal of CERN's for many years, as its members were located in a number of countries.
Months after CERN's original proposal, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) began a project to create an interface to the World-Wide Web. One of NCSA's missions is to aid the scientific research community by producing widely available, non-commercial software. Another of its goals is to investigate new research technologies in the hope that commercial interests will be able to profit from them. In these ways, the Web project was quite appropriate. The NCSA's Software Design Group began work on a versatile, multi-platform interface to the World-Wide Web, and called it Mosaic.
As of June 10, 2007, 1.133 billion people use the Internet according to Internet World Stats. Writing in the Harvard International Review, philosopher N.J.Slabbert, a writer on policy issues for the Washington DC-based Urban Land Institute, has asserted that the Internet is fast becoming a basic feature of global civilization, so that what has traditionally been called "civil society" is now becoming identical with information technology society as defined by Internet use.
Some governments, such as those of Cuba, Iran, North Korea, the People's Republic of China and Saudi Arabia, restrict what people in their countries can access on the Internet, especially political and religious content. This is accomplished through software that filters domains and content so that they may not be easily accessed or obtained without elaborate circumvention.
In its "Worldwide Online Population Forecast, 2006 to 2011," JupiterResearch anticipates that a 38 percent increase in the number of people with online access will mean that, by 2011, 22 percent of the Earth's population will surf the Internet regularly.
For the study, JupiterResearch defined "online users" as people who regularly access the Internet by "dedicated Internet access" devices. Those devices do not include cell phones.