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A shared web hosting service is a web hosting service where many websites reside on one web server connected to the Internet. This is generally the most economical option for hosting, as the overall cost of server maintenance is spread over many customers. By choosing shared hosting, the website will share a physical server with one or more other websites.

The service must include system administration since it is shared by many users; this is a benefit for users who do not want to deal with it, but a hindrance to power users who want more control. In general shared hosting will be inappropriate for users who require extensive software development outside what the hosting provider supports. Almost all applications intended to be on a standard web server work fine with a shared web hosting service. But on the other hand, shared hosting is cheaper than other types of hosting such as dedicated server hosting. Shared hosting usually has usage limits and hosting providers should have extensive reliability features in place. Shared hosting services typically offer basic web statistics support, email and webmail services, auto script installations, updated PHP and MySQL, basic after-sale technical support that is included with a monthly subscription. It also typically uses a web-based control panel system. Most of the large hosting companies use their own custom developed control panel. Control panels and web interfaces can cause controversy however since web hosting companies sometimes sell the right to use their control panel system to others. Attempting to recreate the functionality of a specific control panel is common, which leads to many lawsuits over patent infringement.

In shared hosting, the provider is generally responsible for managing servers, installing server software, security updates, technical support, and other aspects of the service. Most servers are based on the Linux operating system and LAMP (software bundle). Some providers offer Microsoft Windows-based or FreeBSD-based solutions. Server-side facilities for either operating system (OS) have similar functionality (for example: MySQL (database) and many server-side programming languages (such as the widely used PHP programming language) under Linux, or the proprietary SQL Server (database) and ASP.NET programming language under Microsoft Windows.

There are thousands of shared hosting providers in the world. They range from “mom-and-pop shops” and small design firms to multimillion-dollar providers with hundreds of thousands of customers. A large portion of the shared web hosting market is driven through pay per click (PPC) advertising or affiliate programs while some are purely non-profit.

Shared web hosting can also be done privately by sharing the cost of running a server in a colocation centre; this is called cooperative hosting.

Shared web hosting can be accomplished in two ways: name-based and Internet Protocol-based (IP-based), although some control panels allow a mix of name-based and IP-based on the one server.

In IP-based virtual hosting, also called dedicated IP hosting, each virtual host has a different IP address. The web server is configured with multiple physical network interfaces or virtual network interfaces on the same physical interface. The web server software uses the IP address the client connects to in order to determine which website to show the user. The issue of IPv4 address exhaustion means that IP addresses are an increasingly scarce resource, so the primary justification for a site to use a dedicated IP is to be able to use its own SSL/TLS certificate rather than a shared certificate.

In name-based virtual hosting, also called shared IP hosting, the virtual hosts serve multiple hostnames on a single machine with a single IP address. This is possible because when a web browser requests a resource from a web server using HTTP/1.1 it includes the requested hostname as part of the request. The server uses this information to determine which website to show the user.

DNS stands for “Domain Name System”. The domain name system acts like a large telephone directory and in that it’s the master database, which associates a domain name such as www.wikipedia.org with the appropriate IP number. Consider the IP number something similar to a phone number: When someone calls www.wikipedia.org, the ISP looks at the DNS server, and asks “how do I contact www.wikipedia.org?” The DNS server responds, for example, “it can be found at: 91.198.174.192.”. As the Internet understands it, this can be considered the phone number for the server that houses the website. When the domain name is registered/purchased on a particular registrar’s “name server”, the DNS settings are kept on their server, and in most cases point the domain to the name server of the hosting provider. This name server is where the IP number (currently associated with the domain name) resides.

Online shopping is a form of electronic commerce which allows consumers to directly buy goods or services from a seller over the Internet using a web browser or a mobile app. Consumers find a product of interest by visiting the website of the retailer directly or by searching among alternative vendors using a shopping search engine, which displays the same product’s availability and pricing at different e-retailers. As of 2020, customers can shop online using a range of different computers and devices, including desktop computers, laptops, tablet computers and smartphones.

An online shop evokes the physical analogy of buying products or services at a regular “bricks-and-mortar” retailer or shopping center; the process is called business-to-consumer (B2C) online shopping. When an online store is set up to enable businesses to buy from another businesses, the process is called business-to-business (B2B) online shopping. A typical online store enables the customer to browse the firm’s range of products and services, view photos or images of the products, along with information about the product specifications, features and prices.

Online stores usually enable shoppers to use “search” features to find specific models, brands or items. Online customers must have access to the Internet and a valid method of payment in order to complete a transaction, such as a credit card, an Interac-enabled debit card, or a service such as PayPal. For physical products (e.g., paperback books or clothes), the e-tailer ships the products to the customer; for digital products, such as digital audio files of songs or software, the e-tailer usually sends the file to the customer over the Internet. The largest of these online retailing corporations are Alibaba, Amazon.com, and eBay.

Alternative names for the activity are “e-tailing”, a shortened form of “electronic retail” or “e-shopping”, a shortened form of “electronic shopping”. An online store may also be called an e-web-store, e-shop, e-store, Internet shop, web-shop, web-store, online store, online storefront and virtual store. Mobile commerce (or m-commerce) describes purchasing from an online retailer’s mobile device-optimized website or software application (“app”). These websites or apps are designed to enable customers to browse through a companies’ products and services on tablet computers and smartphones.

One of the earliest forms of trade conducted online was IBM’s online transaction processing (OLTP) developed in the 1960s and it allowed the processing of financial transactions in real-time. The computerized ticket reservation system developed for American Airlines called Semi-Automatic Business Research Environment (SABRE) was one of its applications. Here, computer terminals located in different travel agencies were linked to a large IBM mainframe computer, which processed transactions simultaneously and coordinated them so that all travel agents had access to the same information at the same time.

The emergence of online shopping as we know today developed with the emergence of the Internet. Initially, this platform only functioned as an advertising tool for companies, providing information about its products. It quickly moved on from this simple utility to actual online shopping transaction due to the development of interactive Web pages and secure transmissions. Specifically, the growth of the internet as a secure shopping channel has developed since 1994, with the first sales of Sting album ‘Ten Summoner’s Tales’. Wine, chocolates, and flowers soon followed and were among the pioneering retail categories which fueled the growth of online shopping. Researchers found that having products that are appropriate for e-commerce was a key indicator of Internet success. Many of these products did well as they are generic products which shoppers did not need to touch and feel in order to buy. But also importantly, in the early days, there were few shoppers online and they were from a narrow segment: affluent, male, 30+. Online shopping has come along way since these early days and -in the UK- accounts for significant percents (depending on product category as percentages can vary).

As the revenues from online sales continued to grow significantly researchers identified different types of online shoppers, Rohm & Swaninathan identified four categories and named them “convenience shoppers, variety seekers, balanced buyers, and store-oriented shoppers”. They focused on shopping motivations and found that the variety of products available and the perceived convenience of the buying online experience were significant motivating factors. This was different for offline shoppers, who were more motivated by time saving and recreational motives.

English entrepreneur Michael Aldrich was a pioneer of online shopping in 1979. His system connected a modified domestic TV to a real-time transaction processing computer via a domestic telephone line. He believed that videotex, the modified domestic TV technology with a simple menu-driven human-computer interface, was a ‘new, universally applicable, participative communication medium — the first since the invention of the telephone.’ This enabled ‘closed’ corporate information systems to be opened to ‘outside’ correspondents not just for transaction processing but also for e-messaging and information retrieval and dissemination, later known as e-business. His definition of the new mass communications medium as ‘participative’ [interactive, many-to-many] was fundamentally different from the traditional definitions of mass communication and mass media and a precursor to the social networking on the Internet 25 years later. In March 1980 he launched Redifon’s Office Revolution, which allowed consumers, customers, agents, distributors, suppliers and service companies to be connected on-line to the corporate systems and allow business transactions to be completed electronically in real-time. During the 1980s he designed, manufactured, sold, installed, maintained and supported many online shopping systems, using videotex technology. These systems which also provided voice response and handprint processing pre-date the Internet and the World Wide Web, the IBM PC, and Microsoft MS-DOS, and were installed mainly in the UK by large corporations.

The first World Wide Web server and browser, created by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989, opened for commercial use in 1991. Thereafter, subsequent technological innovations emerged in 1994: online banking, the opening of an online pizza shop by Pizza Hut, Netscape’s SSL v2 encryption standard for secure data transfer, and Intershop’s first online shopping system. The first secure retail transaction over the Web was either by NetMarket or Internet Shopping Network in 1994. Immediately after, Amazon.com launched its online shopping site in 1995 and eBay was also introduced in 1995. Alibaba’s sites Taobao and Tmall were launched in 2003 and 2008, respectively. Retailers are increasingly selling goods and services prior to availability through “pretail” for testing, building, and managing demand.

Statistics show that in 2012, Asia-Pacific increased their international sales over 30% giving them over $433 billion in revenue. That is a $69 billion difference between the U.S. revenue of $364.66 billion. It is estimated that Asia-Pacific will increase by another 30% in the year 2013 putting them ahead by more than one-third of all global ecommerce sales.[needs update] The largest online shopping day in the world is Singles Day, with sales just in Alibaba’s sites at US$9.3 billion in 2014.

Online customers must have access to the Internet and a valid method of payment in order to complete a transaction. Generally, higher levels of education and personal income correspond to more favorable perceptions of shopping online. Increased exposure to technology also increases the probability of developing favorable attitudes towards new shopping channels.

The marketing around the digital environment, customer’s buying behaviour may not be influenced and controlled by the brand and firm, when they make a buying decision that might concern the interactions with search engine, recommendations, online reviews and other information. With the quickly separate of the digital devices environment, people are more likely to use their mobile phones, computers, tablets and other digital devices to gather information. In other words, the digital environment has a growing effect on consumer’s mind and buying behaviour. In an online shopping environment, interactive decision may have an influence on aid customer decision making. Each customer is becoming more interactive, and though online reviews customers can influence other potential buyers’ behaviors. In addition, not only those reviews, people more rely on other people’s post information about product commends on social media. There will shows common problems in the past and some solutions or comments of the merchants will be attached for customer reference.

Subsequently, risk and trust would also are two important factors affecting people’s’ behavior in digital environments. Customer consider to switch between e-channels, because they are mainly influence by the comparison with offline shopping, involving growth of security, financial and performance-risks In other words, a customer shopping online that they may receive more risk than people shopping in stores. There are three factors may influence people to do the buying decision, firstly, people cannot examine whether the product satisfy their needs and wants before they receive it. Secondly, customer may concern at after-sale services. Finally, customer may afraid that they cannot fully understand the language used in e-sales. Based on those factors customer perceive risk may as a significantly reason influence the online purchasing behaviour.

Online retailers has place much emphasis on customer trust aspect, trust is another way driving customer’s behaviour in digital environment, which can depend on customer’s attitude and expectation. Indeed, the company’s products design or ideas can not met customer’s expectations. Customer’s purchase intention based on rational expectations, and additionally impacts on emotional trust. Moreover, those expectations can be also establish on the product information and revision from others.

Consumers find a product of interest by visiting the website of the retailer directly or by searching among alternative vendors using a shopping search engine. Once a particular product has been found on the website of the seller, most online retailers use shopping cart software to allow the consumer to accumulate multiple items and to adjust quantities, like filling a physical shopping cart or basket in a conventional store. A “checkout” process follows (continuing the physical-store analogy) in which payment and delivery information is collected, if necessary. Some stores allow consumers to sign up for a permanent online account so that some or all of this information only needs to be entered once. The consumer often receives an e-mail confirmation once the transaction is complete. Less sophisticated stores may rely on consumers to phone or e-mail their orders (although full credit card numbers, expiry date, and Card Security Code, or bank account and routing number should not be accepted by e-mail, for reasons of security).

Online shoppers commonly use a credit card or a PayPal account in order to make payments. However, some systems enable users to create accounts and pay by alternative means, such as:

Some online shops will not accept international credit cards. Some require both the purchaser’s billing and shipping address to be in the same country as the online shop’s base of operation. Other online shops allow customers from any country to send gifts anywhere. The financial part of a transaction may be processed in real time (e.g. letting the consumer know their credit card was declined before they log off), or may be done later as part of the fulfillment process.

Once a payment has been accepted, the goods or services can be delivered in the following ways. For physical items:

For digital items or tickets:

Simple shopping cart systems allow the off-line administration of products and categories. The shop is then generated as HTML files and graphics that can be uploaded to a webspace. The systems do not use an online database. A high-end solution can be bought or rented as a stand-alone program or as an addition to an enterprise resource planning program. It is usually installed on the company’s web server and may integrate into the existing supply chain so that ordering, payment, delivery, accounting and warehousing can be automated to a large extent. Other solutions allow the user to register and create an online shop on a portal that hosts multiple shops simultaneously from one back office. Examples are BigCommerce, Shopify and FlickRocket. Open source shopping cart packages include advanced platforms such as Interchange, and off-the-shelf solutions such as Magento, osCommerce, WooCommerce, PrestaShop, and Zen Cart. Commercial systems can also be tailored so the shop does not have to be created from scratch. By using an existing framework, software modules for various functionalities required by a web shop can be adapted and combined.

Customers are attracted to online shopping not only because of high levels of convenience, but also because of broader selections, competitive pricing, and greater access to information. Business organizations seek to offer online shopping not only because it is of much lower cost compared to bricks and mortar stores, but also because it offers access to a worldwide market, increases customer value, and builds sustainable capabilities.[clarification needed]

Designers of online shops are concerned with the effects of information load. Information load is a product of the spatial and temporal arrangements of stimuli in the web store. Compared with conventional retail shopping, the information environment of virtual shopping is enhanced by providing additional product information such as comparative products and services, as well as various alternatives and attributes of each alternative, etc. Two major dimensions of information load are complexity and novelty. Complexity refers to the number of different elements or features of a site, often the result of increased information diversity. Novelty involves the unexpected, suppressed, new, or unfamiliar aspects of the site. The novelty dimension may keep consumers exploring a shopping site, whereas the complexity dimension may induce impulse purchases.

According to the output of a research report by Western Michigan University published in 2005, an e-commerce website does not have to be good looking with listing on a lot of search engines. It must build relationships with customers to make money. The report also suggests that a website must leave a positive impression on the customers, giving them a reason to come back. However, resent research has proven that sites with higher focus on efficiency, convenience, and personalised services increased the customers motivation to make purchases.

Dyn, an Internet performance management company conducted a survey on more than 1400 consumers across 11 countries in North America, Europe, Middle-East and Asia and the results of the survey are as follows:

These concerns majorly affect the decisions of almost two thirds of the consumers.

The most important factors determining whether customers return to a website are ease of use and the presence of user-friendly features. Usability testing is important for finding problems and improvements in a web site. Methods for evaluating usability include heuristic evaluation, cognitive walkthrough, and user testing. Each technique has its own characteristics and emphasizes different aspects of the user experience.

The popularity of online shopping continues to erode sales of conventional retailers. For example, Best Buy, the largest retailer of electronics in the U.S. in August 2014 reported its tenth consecutive quarterly dip in sales, citing an increasing shift by consumers to online shopping. Amazon.com has the largest market share in the United States. As of May 2018, a survey found two-thirds of Americans had bought something from Amazon (92% of those who had bought anything online), with 40% of online shoppers buying something from Amazon at least once a month. The survey found shopping began at amazon.com 44% of the time, compared to a general search engine at 33%. It estimated 75 million Americans subscribe to Amazon Prime and 35 million more use someone else’s account.

There were 242 million people shopping online in China in 2012. For developing countries and low-income households in developed countries, adoption of e-commerce in place of or in addition to conventional methods is limited by a lack of affordable Internet access.

Online stores are usually available 24 hours a day, and many consumers in Western countries have Internet access both at work and at home. Other establishments such as Internet cafes, community centers and schools provide internet access as well. In contrast, visiting a conventional retail store requires travel or commuting and costs such as gas, parking, or bus tickets, and must usually take place during business hours. Delivery was always a problem which affected the convenience of online shopping. However to overcome this many retailers including online retailers in Taiwan brought in a store pick up service. This now meant that customers could purchase goods online and pick them up at a nearby convenience store, making online shopping more advantageous to customers. In the event of a problem with the item (e.g., the product was not what the consumer ordered or the product was not satisfactory), consumers are concerned with the ease of returning an item in exchange for the correct product or a refund. Consumers may need to contact the retailer, visit the post office and pay return shipping, and then wait for a replacement or refund. Some online companies have more generous return policies to compensate for the traditional advantage of physical stores. For example, the online shoe retailer Zappos.com includes labels for free return shipping, and does not charge a restocking fee, even for returns which are not the result of merchant error. (Note: In the United Kingdom, online shops are prohibited from charging a restocking fee if the consumer cancels their order in accordance with the Consumer Protection (Distance Selling) Act 2000). A 2018 survey in the United States found 26% of online shoppers said they never return items, and another 65% said they rarely do so.

Online stores must describe products for sale with text, photos, and multimedia files, whereas in a physical retail store, the actual product and the manufacturer’s packaging will be available for direct inspection (which might involve a test drive, fitting, or other experimentation). Some online stores provide or link to supplemental product information, such as instructions, safety procedures, demonstrations, or manufacturer specifications. Some provide background information, advice, or how-to guides designed to help consumers decide which product to buy. Some stores even allow customers to comment or rate their items. There are also dedicated review sites that host user reviews for different products. Reviews and even some blogs give customers the option of shopping for cheaper purchases from all over the world without having to depend on local retailers. In a conventional retail store, clerks are generally available to answer questions. Some online stores have real-time chat features, but most rely on e-mails or phone calls to handle customer questions. Even if an online store is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, the customer service team may only be available during regular business hours.

One advantage of shopping online is being able to quickly seek out deals for items or services provided by many different vendors (though some local search engines do exist to help consumers locate products for sale in nearby stores). Search engines, online price comparison services and discovery shopping engines can be used to look up sellers of a particular product or service. Shipping costs (if applicable) reduce the price advantage of online merchandise, though depending on the jurisdiction, a lack of sales tax may compensate for this. Shipping a small number of items, especially from another country, is much more expensive than making the larger shipments bricks-and-mortar retailers order. Some retailers (especially those selling small, high-value items like electronics) offer free shipping on sufficiently large orders. Another major advantage for retailers is the ability to rapidly switch suppliers and vendors without disrupting users’ shopping experience.

Given the lack of ability to inspect merchandise before purchase, consumers are at higher risk of fraud than face-to-face transactions. When ordering merchandise online, the item may not work properly, it may have defects, or it might not be the same item pictured in the online photo. Merchants also risk fraudulent purchases if customers are using stolen credit cards or fraudulent repudiation of the online purchase. However, merchants face less risk from physical theft by using a warehouse instead of a retail storefront. Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption has generally solved the problem of credit card numbers being intercepted in transit between the consumer and the merchant. However, one must still trust the merchant (and employees) not to use the credit card information subsequently for their own purchases, and not to pass the information to others. Also, hackers might break into a merchant’s web site and steal names, addresses and credit card numbers, although the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard is intended to minimize the impact of such breaches. Identity theft is still a concern for consumers. A number of high-profile break-ins in the 2000s has prompted some U.S. states to require disclosure to consumers when this happens. Computer security has thus become a major concern for merchants and e-commerce service providers, who deploy countermeasures such as firewalls and anti-virus software to protect their networks. Phishing is another danger, where consumers are fooled into thinking they are dealing with a reputable retailer, when they have actually been manipulated into feeding private information to a system operated by a malicious party. Denial of service attacks are a minor risk for merchants, as are server and network outages.

Quality seals can be placed on the Shop web page if it has undergone an independent assessment and meets all requirements of the company issuing the seal. The purpose of these seals is to increase the confidence of online shoppers. However, the existence of many different seals, or seals unfamiliar to consumers, may foil this effort to a certain extent.

A number of resources offer advice on how consumers can protect themselves when using online retailer services. These include:

Although the benefits of online shopping are considerable, when the process goes poorly it can create a thorny situation. A few problems that shoppers potentially face include identity theft, faulty products, and the accumulation of spyware. If users are required to put in their credit card information and billing/shipping address and the website is not secure, customer information can be accessible to anyone who knows how to obtain it. Most large online corporations are inventing new ways to make fraud more difficult. However, criminals are constantly responding to these developments with new ways to manipulate the system. Even though online retailers are making efforts to protect consumer information, it is a constant fight to maintain the lead. It is advisable to be aware of the most current technology and scams to protect consumer identity and finances. Product delivery is also a main concern of online shopping. Most companies offer shipping insurance in case the product is lost or damaged. Some shipping companies will offer refunds or compensation for the damage, but this is up to their discretion.

The lack of full cost disclosure may also be problematic. While it may be easy to compare the base price of an item online, it may not be easy to see the total cost up front. Additional fees such as shipping are often not visible until the final step in the checkout process. The problem is especially evident with cross-border purchases, where the cost indicated at the final checkout screen may not include additional fees that must be paid upon delivery such as duties and brokerage. Some services such as the Canadian-based Wishabi attempts to include estimates of these additional cost, but nevertheless, the lack of general full cost disclosure remains a concern.

Privacy of personal information is a significant issue for some consumers. Many consumers wish to avoid spam and telemarketing which could result from supplying contact information to an online merchant. In response, many merchants promise to not use consumer information for these purposes, Many websites keep track of consumer shopping habits in order to suggest items and other websites to view. Brick-and-mortar stores also collect consumer information. Some ask for a shopper’s address and phone number at checkout, though consumers may refuse to provide it. Many larger stores use the address information encoded on consumers’ credit cards (often without their knowledge) to add them to a catalog mailing list. This information is obviously not accessible to the merchant when paying in cash or through a bank (money transfer, in which case there is also proof of payment).

Many successful purely virtual companies deal with digital products, (including information storage, retrieval, and modification), music, movies, office supplies, education, communication, software, photography, and financial transactions. Other successful marketers use drop shipping or affiliate marketing techniques to facilitate transactions of tangible goods without maintaining real inventory. Some non-digital products have been more successful than others for online stores. Profitable items often have a high value-to-weight ratio, they may involve embarrassing purchases, they may typically go to people in remote locations, and they may have shut-ins as their typical purchasers. Items which can fit in a standard mailbox—such as music CDs, DVDs and books—are particularly suitable for a virtual marketer.

Products such as spare parts, both for consumer items like washing machines and for industrial equipment like centrifugal pumps, also seem good candidates for selling online. Retailers often need to order spare parts specially, since they typically do not stock them at consumer outlets—in such cases, e-commerce solutions in spares do not compete with retail stores, only with other ordering systems. A factor for success in this niche can consist of providing customers with exact, reliable information about which part number their particular version of a product needs, for example by providing parts lists keyed by serial number. Products less suitable for e-commerce include products that have a low value-to-weight ratio, products that have a smell, taste, or touch component, products that need trial fittings—most notably clothing—and products where colour integrity appears important. Nonetheless, some web sites have had success delivering groceries and clothing sold through the internet is big business in the U.S.

High-volume websites, such as Yahoo!, Amazon.com, and eBay, offer hosting services for online stores to all size retailers. These stores are presented within an integrated navigation framework, sometimes known as virtual shopping malls or online marketplaces.

One of the great benefits of online shopping is the ability to read product reviews, written either by experts or fellow online shoppers. The Nielsen Company conducted a survey in March 2010 and polled more than 27,000 Internet users in 55 markets from the Asia-Pacific, Europe, Middle East, North America, and South America to look at questions such as “How do consumers shop online?”, “What do they intend to buy?”, “How do they use various online shopping web pages?”, and the impact of social media and other factors that come into play when consumers are trying to decide how to spend their money on which product or service. According to the research, reviews on electronics (57%) such as DVD players, cellphones, or PlayStations, and so on, reviews on cars (45%), and reviews on software (37%) play an important role in influencing consumers who tend to make purchases online. Furthermore, 40% of online shoppers indicate that they would not even buy electronics without consulting online reviews first.

In addition to online reviews, peer recommendations on online shopping pages or social media websites play a key role for online shoppers when they are researching future purchases. 90% of all purchases made are influenced by social media.

The Wayback Machine is a digital archive of the World Wide Web, founded by the Internet Archive, a nonprofit library based in San Francisco. It allows the user to go “back in time” and see what websites looked like in the past. Its founders, Brewster Kahle and Bruce Gilliat, developed the Wayback Machine with the intention of providing “universal access to all knowledge” by preserving archived copies of defunct webpages.

Since its launch in 1996, over 531 billion pages have been added to the archive. The service has also sparked controversy over whether creating archived pages without the owner’s permission constitutes copyright infringement in certain jurisdictions.

Internet Archive founders Brewster Kahle and Bruce Gilliat launched the Wayback Machine in October of 2001 to address the problem of website content vanishing whenever it gets changed, or when a website is shut down. The service enables users to see archived versions of web pages across time, which the archive calls a “three-dimensional index”. Kahle and Gilliat created the machine hoping to archive the entire Internet and provide “universal access to all knowledge.”

The name Wayback Machine was chosen as a reference to a fictional time-traveling device, the “Wayback Machine”, used by the characters Mister Peabody and Sherman in the animated cartoon The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show from the 1960s. In one of the animated cartoon’s component segments, Peabody’s Improbable History, the characters routinely used the machine to witness, participate in, and often alter famous events in history.

The Wayback Machine began archiving cached web pages in May 1996, with the goal of making the service public five years later. From 1996 to 2001, the information was kept on digital tape, with Kahle occasionally allowing researchers and scientists to tap into the clunky database. When the archive reached its fifth anniversary in 2001, it was unveiled and opened to the public in a ceremony at the University of California, Berkeley. By the time the Wayback Machine launched, it already contained over 10 billion archived pages.

The data is stored on the Internet Archive’s large cluster of Linux nodes. It revisits and archives new versions of websites on occasion (see technical details below). Sites can also be captured manually by entering a website’s URL into the search box, provided that the website allows the Wayback Machine to “crawl” it and save the data.
On October 30, 2020, the Wayback Machine began fact-checking content.

Software has been developed to “crawl” the Web and download all publicly accessible information and data files on webpages, the Gopher hierarchy, the Netnews (Usenet) bulletin board system, and downloadable software. The information collected by these “crawlers” does not include all the information available on the Internet, since much of the data is restricted by the publisher or stored in databases that are not accessible. To overcome inconsistencies in partially cached websites, Archive-It.org was developed in 2005 by the Internet Archive as a means of allowing institutions and content creators to voluntarily harvest and preserve collections of digital content, and create digital archives.

Crawls are contributed from various sources, some imported from third parties and others generated internally by the Archive. For example, crawls are contributed by the Sloan Foundation and Alexa, crawls run by IA on behalf of NARA and the Internet Memory Foundation, mirrors of Common Crawl. The “Worldwide Web Crawls” have been running since 2010 and capture the global Web.

The frequency of snapshot captures varies per website. Websites in the “Worldwide Web Crawls” are included in a “crawl list”, with the site archived once per crawl. A crawl can take months or even years to complete, depending on size. For example, “Wide Crawl Number 13” started on January 9, 2015, and completed on July 11, 2016. However, there may be multiple crawls ongoing at any one time, and a site might be included in more than one crawl list, so how often a site is crawled varies widely.

As of October 2019, users are limited to 5 archival requests and retrievals per minute.[why?]

As technology has developed over the years, the storage capacity of the Wayback Machine has grown. In 2003, after only two years of public access, the Wayback Machine was growing at a rate of 12 terabytes/month. The data is stored on PetaBox rack systems custom designed by Internet Archive staff. The first 100TB rack became fully operational in June 2004, although it soon became clear that they would need much more storage than that.

The Internet Archive migrated its customized storage architecture to Sun Open Storage in 2009, and hosts a new data center in a Sun Modular Datacenter on Sun Microsystems’ California campus. As of 2009[update], the Wayback Machine contained approximately three petabytes of data and was growing at a rate of 100 terabytes each month.

A new, improved version of the Wayback Machine, with an updated interface and a fresher index of archived content, was made available for public testing in 2011. In March that year, it was said on the Wayback Machine forum that “the Beta of the new Wayback Machine has a more complete and up-to-date index of all crawled materials into 2010, and will continue to be updated regularly. The index driving the classic Wayback Machine only has a little bit of material past 2008, and no further index updates are planned, as it will be phased out this year.” Also in 2011, the Internet Archive installed their sixth pair of PetaBox racks which increased the Wayback Machine’s storage capacity by 700 terabytes.

In January 2013, the company announced a ground-breaking milestone of 240 billion URLs.

In October 2013, the company introduced the “Save a Page” feature which allows any Internet user to archive the contents of a URL, and quickly generates a permanent link unlike the preceding liveweb feature.

In December 2014, the Wayback Machine contained 435 billion web pages—almost nine petabytes of data, and was growing at about 20 terabytes a week.

In March 2015,[date verification needed] security researchers became aware of the threat posed by the service’s unintentional hosting of malicious binaries from archived sites.

In July 2016, the Wayback Machine reportedly contained around 15 petabytes of data.

In September 2018, the Wayback Machine contained over 25 petabytes of data.

As of December 2020, the Wayback Machine contained over 70 petabytes of data.

Between October 2013 and March 2015, the website’s global Alexa rank changed from 163 to 208. In March 2019 the rank was at 244.

Historically, Wayback Machine has respected the robots exclusion standard (robots.txt) in determining if a website would be crawled – or if already crawled, if its archives would be publicly viewable. Website owners had the option to opt-out of Wayback Machine through the use of robots.txt. It applied robots.txt rules retroactively; if a site blocked the Internet Archive, any previously archived pages from the domain were immediately rendered unavailable as well. In addition, the Internet Archive stated that “Sometimes a website owner will contact us directly and ask us to stop crawling or archiving a site. We comply with these requests.” In addition, the website says: “The Internet Archive is not interested in preserving or offering access to Web sites or other Internet documents of persons who do not want their materials in the collection.”

On April 17, 2017, reports surfaced of sites that had gone defunct and became parked domains that were using robots.txt to exclude themselves from search engines, resulting in them being inadvertently excluded from the Wayback Machine. The Internet archive changed the policy to now require an explicit exclusion request to remove it from the Wayback Machine.

Wayback’s retroactive exclusion policy is based in part upon Recommendations for Managing Removal Requests and Preserving Archival Integrity published by the School of Information Management and Systems at University of California, Berkeley in 2002, which gives a website owner the right to block access to the site’s archives. Wayback has complied with this policy to help avoid expensive litigation.

The Wayback retroactive exclusion policy began to relax in 2017, when it stopped honoring robots.txt on U.S. government and military web sites for both crawling and displaying web pages. As of April 2017, Wayback is ignoring robots.txt more broadly, not just for U.S. government websites.

From its public launch in 2001, the Wayback Machine has been studied by scholars both for the ways it stores and collects data as well as for the actual pages contained in its archive. As of 2013, scholars had written about 350 articles on the Wayback Machine, mostly from the information technology, library science, and social science fields. Social science scholars have used the Wayback Machine to analyze how the development of websites from the mid-1990s to the present has affected the company’s growth.

When the Wayback Machine archives a page, it usually includes most of the hyperlinks, keeping those links active when they just as easily could have been broken by the Internet’s instability. Researchers in India studied the effectiveness of the Wayback Machine’s ability to save hyperlinks in online scholarly publications and found that it saved slightly more than half of them.

“Journalists use the Wayback Machine to view dead websites, dated news reports, and changes to website contents. Its content has been used to hold politicians accountable and expose battlefield lies.” In 2014, an archived social media page of Igor Girkin, a separatist rebel leader in Ukraine, showed him boasting about his troops having shot down a suspected Ukrainian military airplane before it became known that the plane actually was a civilian Malaysian Airlines jet (Malaysia Airlines Flight 17), after which he deleted the post and blamed Ukraine’s military for downing the plane. In 2017, the March for Science originated from a discussion on Reddit that indicated someone had visited Archive.org and discovered that all references to climate change had been deleted from the White House website. In response, a user commented, “There needs to be a Scientists’ March on Washington”.

Furthermore, the site is used heavily for verification, providing access to references and content creation by Wikipedia editors.

In September 2020, a partnership was announced with Cloudflare to automatically archive websites served via its “Always Online” service, which will also allow it to direct users to its copy of the site if it cannot reach the original host.

In 2014 there was a six-month lag time between when a website was crawled and when it became available for viewing in the Wayback Machine. Currently, the lag time is 3 to 10 hours. The Wayback Machine offers only limited search facilities. Its “Site Search” feature allows users to find a site based on words describing the site, rather than words found on the web pages themselves.

The Wayback Machine does not include every web page ever made due to the limitations of its web crawler. The Wayback Machine cannot completely archive web pages that contain interactive features such as Flash platforms and forms written in JavaScript and progressive web applications, because those functions require interaction with the host website. This means that, since June 2013, the Wayback Machine has been unable to display YouTube comments when saving YouTube pages, as, according to the Archive Team, comments are no longer “loaded within the page itself.” The Wayback Machine’s web crawler has difficulty extracting anything not coded in HTML or one of its variants, which can often result in broken hyperlinks and missing images. Due to this, the web crawler cannot archive “orphan pages” that are not linked to by other pages. The Wayback Machine’s crawler only follows a predetermined number of hyperlinks based on a preset depth limit, so it cannot archive every hyperlink on every page.

Starting in April 2018, administrative staff members of the Wayback Machine’s archive team have enforced the Quarter month rule, by occasionally deleting time intervals of 23 days or 39 days (3/4 and 5/4 of a month, respectively), in order to reduce the queue size.

In a 2009 case, Netbula, LLC v. Chordiant Software Inc., defendant Chordiant filed a motion to compel Netbula to disable the robots.txt file on its website that was causing the Wayback Machine to retroactively remove access to previous versions of pages it had archived from Netbula’s site, pages that Chordiant believed would support its case.

Netbula objected to the motion on the ground that defendants were asking to alter Netbula’s website and that they should have subpoenaed Internet Archive for the pages directly. An employee of Internet Archive filed a sworn statement supporting Chordiant’s motion, however, stating that it could not produce the web pages by any other means “without considerable burden, expense and disruption to its operations.”

Magistrate Judge Howard Lloyd in the Northern District of California, San Jose Division, rejected Netbula’s arguments and ordered them to disable the robots.txt blockage temporarily in order to allow Chordiant to retrieve the archived pages that they sought.

In an October 2004 case, Telewizja Polska USA, Inc. v. Echostar Satellite, No. 02 C 3293, 65 Fed. R. Evid. Serv. 673 (N.D. Ill. October 15, 2004), a litigant attempted to use the Wayback Machine archives as a source of admissible evidence, perhaps for the first time. Telewizja Polska is the provider of TVP Polonia and EchoStar operates the Dish Network. Prior to the trial proceedings, EchoStar indicated that it intended to offer Wayback Machine snapshots as proof of the past content of Telewizja Polska’s website. Telewizja Polska brought a motion in limine to suppress the snapshots on the grounds of hearsay and unauthenticated source, but Magistrate Judge Arlander Keys rejected Telewizja Polska’s assertion of hearsay and denied TVP’s motion in limine to exclude the evidence at trial. At the trial, however, District Court Judge Ronald Guzman, the trial judge, overruled Magistrate Keys’ findings, and held that neither the affidavit of the Internet Archive employee nor the underlying pages (i.e., the Telewizja Polska website) were admissible as evidence. Judge Guzman reasoned that the employee’s affidavit contained both hearsay and inconclusive supporting statements, and the purported web page, printouts were not self-authenticating.

Provided some additional requirements are met (e.g., providing an authoritative statement of the archivist), the United States patent office and the European Patent Office will accept date stamps from the Internet Archive as evidence of when a given Web page was accessible to the public. These dates are used to determine if a Web page is available as prior art for instance in examining a patent application.

There are technical limitations to archiving a website, and as a consequence, it is possible for opposing parties in litigation to misuse the results provided by website archives. This problem can be exacerbated by the practice of submitting screenshots of web pages in complaints, answers, or expert witness reports when the underlying links are not exposed and therefore, can contain errors. For example, archives such as the Wayback Machine do not fill out forms and therefore, do not include the contents of non-RESTful e-commerce databases in their archives.

In Europe, the Wayback Machine could be interpreted as violating copyright laws. Only the content creator can decide where their content is published or duplicated, so the Archive would have to delete pages from its system upon request of the creator. The exclusion policies for the Wayback Machine may be found in the FAQ section of the site.

A number of cases have been brought against the Internet Archive specifically for its Wayback Machine archiving efforts.

In late 2002, the Internet Archive removed various sites that were critical of Scientology from the Wayback Machine. An error message stated that this was in response to a “request by the site owner”. Later, it was clarified that lawyers from the Church of Scientology had demanded the removal and that the site owners did not want their material removed.

In 2003, Harding Earley Follmer & Frailey defended a client from a trademark dispute using the Archive’s Wayback Machine. The attorneys were able to demonstrate that the claims made by the plaintiff were invalid, based on the content of their website from several years prior. The plaintiff, Healthcare Advocates, then amended their complaint to include the Internet Archive, accusing the organization of copyright infringement as well as violations of the DMCA and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Healthcare Advocates claimed that, since they had installed a robots.txt file on their website, even if after the initial lawsuit was filed, the Archive should have removed all previous copies of the plaintiff website from the Wayback Machine, however, some material continued to be publicly visible on Wayback. The lawsuit was settled out of court, after Wayback fixed the problem.

Activist Suzanne Shell filed suit in December 2005, demanding Internet Archive pay her US$100,000 for archiving her website profane-justice.org between 1999 and 2004. Internet Archive filed a declaratory judgment action in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California on January 20, 2006, seeking a judicial determination that Internet Archive did not violate Shell’s copyright. Shell responded and brought a countersuit against Internet Archive for archiving her site, which she alleges is in violation of her terms of service. On February 13, 2007, a judge for the United States District Court for the District of Colorado dismissed all counterclaims except breach of contract. The Internet Archive did not move to dismiss copyright infringement claims Shell asserted arising out of its copying activities, which would also go forward.

On April 25, 2007, Internet Archive and Suzanne Shell jointly announced the settlement of their lawsuit. The Internet Archive said it “…has no interest in including materials in the Wayback Machine of persons who do not wish to have their Web content archived. We recognize that Ms Shell has a valid and enforceable copyright in her Web site and we regret that the inclusion of her Web site in the Wayback Machine resulted in this litigation.” Shell said, “I respect the historical value of Internet Archive’s goal. I never intended to interfere with that goal nor cause it any harm.”

Between 2013 and 2016, a pornographic actor named Daniel Davydiuk tried to remove archived images of himself from the Wayback Machine’s archive, first by sending multiple DMCA requests to the archive, and then by appealing to the Federal Court of Canada.

Archive.org is currently blocked in China. After the Islamic State terrorist organization was banned, the Internet Archive had been blocked in its entirety in Russia as a host of an outreach video from that organization, for a short time in 2015-16.[needs update] Since 2016 the website has been back, available in its entirety, although local commercial lobbyists are suing the Internet Archive in a local court to ban it on copyright grounds.

Alison Macrina, director of the Library Freedom Project, notes that “while librarians deeply value individual privacy, we also strongly oppose censorship”.

There are known rare cases where online access to content which “for nothing” has put people in danger was disabled by the website.[clarification needed]

Other threats include natural disasters, destruction (remote or physical), manipulation of the archive’s contents (see also: cyberattack, backup), problematic copyright laws and surveillance of the site’s users.

Alexander Rose, executive director of the Long Now Foundation, suspects that in the long-term of multiple generations “next to nothing” will survive in a useful way, stating, “If we have continuity in our technological civilization, I suspect a lot of the bare data will remain findable and searchable. But I suspect almost nothing of the format in which it was delivered will be recognizable”, because sites “with deep back-ends of content-management systems like Drupal and Ruby and Django” are harder to archive.

In an article reflecting on the preservation of human knowledge, The Atlantic has commented that the Internet Archive, which describes itself to be built for the long-term, “is working furiously to capture data before it disappears without any long-term infrastructure to speak of.”

The Pirate Bay (sometimes abbreviated as TPB) is an online index of digital content of entertainment media and software. Founded in 2003 by Swedish think tank Piratbyran, The Pirate Bay allows visitors to search, download, and contribute magnet links and torrent files, which facilitate peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing among users of the BitTorrent protocol.

The Pirate Bay has sparked controversies and discussion about legal aspects of file sharing, copyright, and civil liberties and has become a platform for political initiatives against established intellectual property laws as well as a central figure in an anti-copyright movement. The website faced several shutdowns and domain seizures, switching to a series of new web addresses to continue operating.

In April 2009, the website’s founders (Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, and Gottfrid Svartholm) were found guilty in the Pirate Bay trial in Sweden for assisting in copyright infringement and were sentenced to serve one year in prison and pay a fine. In some countries, Internet service providers (ISPs) have been ordered to block access to the website. Subsequently, proxy websites have been providing access to it. Founders Svartholm, Neij, and Sunde were all released by 2015 after having served shortened sentences.

The Pirate Bay was established in September 2003 by the Swedish anti-copyright organisation Piratbyran (The Piracy Bureau); it has been run as a separate organisation since October 2004. The Pirate Bay was first run by Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij, who are known by their nicknames “anakata” and “TiAMO”, respectively. They have both been accused of “assisting in making copyrighted content available” by the Motion Picture Association of America. On 31 May 2006, the website’s servers in Stockholm were raided and taken away by Swedish police, leading to three days of downtime. The Pirate Bay claims to be a non-profit entity based in the Seychelles; however, this is disputed.

The Pirate Bay has been involved in a number of lawsuits, both as plaintiff and as defendant. On 17 April 2009, Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm, and Carl Lundstrom were found guilty of assistance to copyright infringement and sentenced to one year in prison and payment of a fine of 30 million SEK (approximately 4.2m USD, 2.8m GBP, or 3.1m EUR), after a trial of nine days. The defendants appealed the verdict and accused the judge of giving in to political pressure. On 26 November 2010, a Swedish appeals court upheld the verdict, decreasing the original prison terms but increasing the fine to 46 million SEK. On 17 May 2010, because of an injunction against their bandwidth provider, the site was taken offline. Access to the website was later restored with a message making fun of the injunction on their front page. On 23 June 2010, the group Piratbyran disbanded due to the death of Ibi Kopimi Botani, a prominent member and co-founder of the group.

The Pirate Bay was hosted for several years by PRQ, a Sweden-based company, owned by creators of TPB Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij. PRQ is said to provide “highly secure, no-questions-asked hosting services to its customers”. From May 2011, Serious Tubes Networks started providing network connectivity to The Pirate Bay. On 23 January 2012, The Pirate Bay added the new category Physibles. These are 3D files described as “data objects that are able (and feasible) to become physical” using a 3D printer. In May 2012, as part of Google’s newly inaugurated “Transparency Report”, the company reported over 6,000 formal requests to remove Pirate Bay links from the Google Search index; those requests covered over 80,500 URLs, with the five copyright holders having the most requests consisting of: Froytal Services LLC, Bang Bros, Takedown Piracy LLC, Amateur Teen Kingdom, and International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI). On 10 August 2013, The Pirate Bay announced the release of PirateBrowser, a free web browser used to circumvent internet censorship. The site was the most visited torrent directory on the World Wide Web from 2003 until November 2014, when KickassTorrents had more visitors according to Alexa. On 8 December 2014, Google removed most of the Google Play apps from its app store that have “The Pirate Bay” in the title.

On 9 December 2014, The Pirate Bay was raided by the Swedish police, who seized servers, computers, and other equipment. Several other torrent related sites including EZTV, Zoink, Torrage and the Istole tracker were also shut down in addition to The Pirate Bay’s forum Suprbay.org. On the second day after the raid EZTV was reported to be showing “signs of life” with uploads to ExtraTorrent and KickassTorrents and supporting proxy sites like eztv-proxy.net via the main website’s backend IP addresses. Several copies of The Pirate Bay went online during the next several days, most notably oldpiratebay.org, created by isoHunt.

On 19 May 2015, the .se domain of The Pirate Bay was ordered to be seized following a ruling by a Swedish court. The site reacted by adding six new domains in its place. The judgment was appealed on 26 May 2015. On 12 May 2016, the appeal was
dismissed and the Court ruled the domains be turned over to the Swedish state. The site returned to using its original .org domain in May 2016. In August 2016, the US government shut down KickassTorrents, which resulted in The Pirate Bay becoming once again the most visited BitTorrent website.

The Pirate Bay allows users to search for Magnet links. These are used to reference resources available for download via peer-to-peer networks which, when opened in a BitTorrent client, begin downloading the desired content. (Originally, The Pirate Bay allowed users to download BitTorrent files (torrents), small files that contain metadata necessary to download the data files from other users). The torrents are organised into categories: “Audio”, “Video”, “Applications”, “Games”, “Porn” and “Other”. Registration requires an email address and is free; registered users may upload their own torrents and comment on torrents. According to a study of newly uploaded files during 2013 by TorrentFreak, 44% of uploads were television shows and movies, porn was in second place with 35% of uploads, and audio made up 9% of uploads.

The website features a browse function that enables users to see what is available in broad categories like Audio, Video, and Games, as well as sub-categories like Audio books, High-res Movies, and Comics. Since January 2012, it also features a “Physibles” category for 3D-printable objects. The contents of these categories can be sorted by file name, the number of seeders or leechers, the date posted, etc.

Piratbyran described The Pirate Bay as a long-running project of performance art. Normally, the front page of The Pirate Bay featured a drawing of a pirate ship with the logo of the 1980s anti-copyright infringement campaign, “Home Taping Is Killing Music”, on its sails instead of the Jolly Roger symbol usually associated with pirate ships.

Initially, The Pirate Bay’s four Linux servers ran a custom web server called Hypercube. An old version is open-source. On 1 June 2005, The Pirate Bay updated its website in an effort to reduce bandwidth usage, which was reported to be at 2 HTTP requests per millisecond on each of the four web servers, as well as to create a more user friendly interface for the front-end of the website. The website now runs Lighttpd and PHP on its dynamic front ends, MySQL at the database back end, Sphinx on the two search systems, memcached for caching SQL queries and PHP-sessions and Varnish in front of Lighttpd for caching static content. As of September 2008[update], The Pirate Bay consisted of 31 dedicated servers including nine dynamic web fronts, a database, two search engines, and eight BitTorrent trackers.

On 7 December 2007, The Pirate Bay finished the move from Hypercube to Opentracker as its BitTorrent tracking software, also enabling the use of the UDP tracker protocol for which Hypercube lacked support. This allowed UDP multicast to be used to synchronise the multiple servers with each other much faster than before. Opentracker is free software.

In June 2008, The Pirate Bay announced that their servers would support SSL encryption in response to Sweden’s new wiretapping law. On 19 January 2009, The Pirate Bay launched IPv6 support for their tracker system, using an IPv6-only version of Opentracker. On 17 November 2009, The Pirate Bay shut off its tracker service permanently, stating that centralised trackers are no longer needed since distributed hash tables (DHT), peer exchange (PEX), and magnet links allow peers to find each other and content in a decentralised way.

On 20 February 2012, The Pirate Bay announced in a Facebook post that after 29 February the site would no longer offer torrent files, and would instead offer only magnet links. The site commented: “Not having torrents will be a bit cheaper for us but it will also make it harder for our common enemies to stop us.” The site added that torrents being shared by fewer than ten people will retain their torrent files, to ensure compatibility with older software that may not support magnet links.

In April 2007, a rumour was confirmed on the Swedish talk show Bert that The Pirate Bay had received financial support from right-wing entrepreneur Carl Lundstrom. This caused some consternation since Lundstrom, an heir to the Wasabrod fortune, is known for financing several far-right political parties and movements like Sverigedemokraterna and Bevara Sverige Svenskt (Keep Sweden Swedish). During the talk show, Piratbyran spokesman Tobias Andersson acknowledged that “without Lundstrom’s support, Pirate Bay would not have been able to start” and stated that most of the money went towards acquiring servers and bandwidth.

From 2004 until 2006, The Pirate Bay had a “Donate” link to a donations page which listed several payment methods, stated that funds supported only the tracker, and offered time-limited benefits to donors such as no advertisements and “VIP” status. After that, the link was removed from the home page, and the donations page only recommended donating “to your local pro-piracy group” for a time, after which it redirected to the site’s main page. Billboard claimed that the site in 2009 “appeals for donations to keep its service running”. In 2006, Petter Nilsson, a candidate on the Swedish political reality show Toppkandidaterna (The Top Candidates), donated 35,000 SEK (US$4,925.83) to The Pirate Bay, which they used to buy new servers.

In 2007, the site ran a fund intended to buy Sealand, a platform with debated micronation status. In 2009, the convicted principals of TPB requested that users stop trying to donate money for their fines, because they refused to pay them. In 2013, The Pirate Bay published its Bitcoin address on the site front page for donations, as well as Litecoin.

The site links to an online store selling site-related merchandise, first noted in 2006 in Svenska Dagbladet.

Since 2006, the website has received financing through advertisements on result pages. According to speculations by Svenska Dagbladet, the advertisements generate about 600,000 SEK (US$84,000) per month. In an investigation in 2006, the police concluded that The Pirate Bay brings in 1.2 million SEK (US$169,000) per year from advertisements. The prosecution estimated in the 2009 trial from emails and screenshots that the advertisements pay over 10 million SEK (US$1.4M) a year, but the indictment used the estimate from the police investigation. The lawyers of the site’s administrators counted the 2006 revenue closer to 725,000 SEK (US$102,000). The verdict of the first trial, however, quoted the estimate from the preliminary investigation.

As of 2008[update], IFPI claims that the website is extremely profitable, and that The Pirate Bay is more engaged in making profit than supporting people’s rights. The website has insisted that these allegations are not true, stating, “It’s not free to operate a Web Site on this scale”, and, “If we were making lots of money I, Svartholm, wouldn’t be working late at the office tonight, I’d be sitting on a beach somewhere, working on my tan.” In response to claims of annual revenue exceeding US$3 million made by the IFPI, the site’s spokesman Peter Sunde argues that the website’s high bandwidth, power, and hardware costs eliminate the potential for profit. The Pirate Bay, he says, may ultimately be operating at a loss. In the 2009 trial, the defence estimated the site’s yearly expenses to be 800,000 SEK (US$110,000).

There have been unintentional advertisers. In 2007, an online ad agency placed Wal-Mart The Simpsons DVD ads “along with search results that included downloads of the series”. In 2012, banner ads for Canada’s Department of Finance Economic Action Plan were placed atop search results, as part of a larger “media buy”, but were pulled “quickly”.

According to the site’s usage policy, it reserves the right to charge commercial policy violators “a basic fee of €5,000 plus bandwidth and other costs that may arise due to the violation”. Co-founder Peter Sunde accused Swedish book publishers, who scraped the site for information about copyrighted books, of violating the usage policy, and asserted TPB’s copyright on its database.

The team behind The Pirate Bay has worked on several websites and software projects of varying degrees of permanence. In 2007, BayImg, an image hosting website similar to TinyPic went online in June. Pre-publication images posted to BayImg became part of a legal battle when Conde Nast’s network was later allegedly hacked.
In July, “within hours after Ingmar Bergman’s death”, BergmanBits.com was launched, listing torrents for the director’s films, online until mid-2008.
In August, The Pirate Bay relaunched the BitTorrent website Suprnova.org to perform the same functions as The Pirate Bay, with different torrent trackers, but the site languished; the domain was returned to its original owner in August 2010, and it now redirects to TorrentFreak.tv.
Suprbay.org was introduced in August as the official forum for ThePirateBay.org and the various sites connected to it. Users can request reseeding of torrents, or report malware within torrent files or illegal material on ThePirateBay.org.
BOiNK was announced in October in response to the raid on Oink’s Pink Palace, a music-oriented BitTorrent website. A month later Sunde cancelled BOiNK, citing the many new music websites created since the downfall of OiNK.
A Mac dashboard widget was released in December, listing “top 10 stuff currently on TPB, either per category or the full list”. SlopsBox, a disposable email address anti-spam service, also appeared in December, and was reviewed in 2009.

In 2008, Baywords was launched as a free blogging service that lets users of the site blog about anything as long as it does not break any Swedish laws. In December, The Pirate Bay resurrected ShareReactor as a combined eD2k and BitTorrent site. The same month, the Vio mobile video converter was released, designed to convert video files for playback on mobile devices such as iPhone, BlackBerry, Android, many Nokia and Windows Mobile devices.

In 2009, Pastebay, a note sharing service similar to Pastebin, was made available to the public as of 23 March. The Video Bay video streaming/sharing site was announced in June to be “The YouTube Killer”, with content viewable in HTML 5-capable browsers. The site was in an “Extreme Beta” phase; a message on the homepage instructed the user “don’t expect anything to work at all”. The Video Bay was never completed and as of 28 April 2013, The Video Bay is inaccessible.

On 18 April 2011, Pirate Bay temporarily changed its name to “Research Bay”, collaborating with P2P researchers of the Lund University Cybernorms group in a large poll of P2P users. The researchers published their results online on “The Survey Bay”, as a public Creative Commons project in 2013. In January 2012, the site announced The Promo Bay; “doodles” by selected musicians, artists and others could be rotated onto the site’s front page at a future date. Brazilian novelist Paulo Coelho was promoted, offering a collection of his books for free download. By November, 10,000 artists were reported to have signed up. TPB preserves a dated collection of exhibited logos. On 2 December 2012, some ISPs in the UK such as BT, Virgin Media, and BE started blocking The Promo Bay but stopped a few days later when the BPI reversed its position.

In January 2007, when the micronation of Sealand was put up for sale, the ACFI and The Pirate Bay tried to buy it. The Sealand government, however, did not want to be involved with The Pirate Bay, as it was their opinion that file sharing represented “theft of proprietary rights”. A new plan was formed to buy an island instead, but this too was never implemented, despite the website having raised US$25,000 (€15,000) in donations for this cause.

The P2P news blog TorrentFreak reported on 12 October 2007 that the Internet domain ifpi.com, which previously belonged to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, an anti-piracy organisation, had been acquired by The Pirate Bay. When asked about how they got hold of the domain, Sunde told TorrentFreak, “It’s not a hack, someone just gave us the domain name. We have no idea how they got it, but it’s ours and we’re keeping it.” The website was renamed “The International Federation of Pirates Interests” However, the IFPI filed a complaint with the World Intellectual Property Organization shortly thereafter, which subsequently ordered The Pirate Bay to return the domain name to the IFPI.

On 31 May 2006, a raid against The Pirate Bay and people involved with the website took place as ordered by judge Tomas Norstrom, later the presiding judge of the 2009 trial, prompted by allegations of copyright violations. Police officers shut down the website and confiscated its servers, as well as all other servers hosted by The Pirate Bay’s Internet service provider, PRQ. The company is owned by two operators of The Pirate Bay. Three people – Gottfrid Svartholm, Mikael Viborg, and Fredrik Neij – were held by the police for questioning, but were released later that evening. All servers in the room were seized, including those running the website of Piratbyran, an independent organisation fighting for file sharing rights, as well as servers unrelated to The Pirate Bay or other file sharing activities. Equipment such as hardware routers, switches, blank CDs, and fax machines were also seized.

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) wrote in a press release: “Since filing a criminal complaint in Sweden in November 2004, the film industry has worked vigorously with Swedish and U.S. government officials in Sweden to shut this illegal website down.” MPAA CEO Dan Glickman also stated, “Intellectual property theft is a problem for film industries all over the world and we are glad that the local government in Sweden has helped stop The Pirate Bay from continuing to enable rampant copyright theft on the Internet.” The MPAA press release set forth its justification for the raid and claimed that there were three arrests; however, the individuals were not actually arrested, only held for questioning. The release also reprinted John G. Malcolm’s allegation that The Pirate Bay was making money from the distribution of copyrighted material, a criticism denied by the Pirate Bay.

After the raid, The Pirate Bay displayed a message that confirmed that the Swedish police had executed search warrants for breach of copyright law or assisting such a breach. The closure message initially caused some confusion because on 1 April 2005, April Fools’ Day, The Pirate Bay had posted a similar message as a prank, stating that they were unavailable due to a raid by the Swedish Anti-Piracy Bureau and IFPI. Piratbyran set up a temporary news blog to inform the public about the incident. On 2 June 2006, The Pirate Bay was available once again, with their logo depicting a pirate ship firing cannonballs at the Hollywood Sign.The Pirate Bay has servers in both Belgium and Russia for future use in case of another raid. According to The Pirate Bay, in the two years following the raid, it grew from 1 million to 2.7 million registered users and from 2.5 million to 12 million peers. The Pirate Bay now claims over 5 million active users.

Sweden’s largest technology museum, the Swedish National Museum of Science and Technology, acquired one of the confiscated servers in 2009 and exhibited it for having great symbolic value as a “big problem or a big opportunity”.

In September 2008, the Swedish media reported that the public preliminary investigation protocols concerning a child murder case known as the Arboga case had been made available through a torrent on The Pirate Bay. In Sweden, preliminary investigations become publicly available the moment a lawsuit is filed and can be ordered from the court by any individual. The document included pictures from the autopsy of the two murdered children, which caused their father Nicklas Jangestig to urge the website to have the pictures removed. The Pirate Bay refused to remove the torrent. The number of downloads increased to about 50,000 a few days later. On 11 September 2008, the website’s press contact Peter Sunde participated in the debate program Debatt on the public broadcaster SVT. Sunde had agreed to participate on the condition that the father Nicklas Jangestig would not take part in the debate. Jangestig ultimately did participate in the program by telephone, which made Sunde feel betrayed by SVT. This caused The Pirate Bay to suspend all of its press contacts the following day.

“I don’t think it’s our job to judge if something is ethical or unethical or what other people want to put out on the internet”, said The Pirate Bay’s spokesperson Peter Sunde to TV4.

In September 2007, a large number of internal emails were leaked from anti-piracy company MediaDefender by an anonymous hacker. Some of the leaked emails discussed hiring hackers to perform DDoS attacks on The Pirate Bay’s servers and trackers. In response to the leak, The Pirate Bay filed charges in Sweden against MediaDefender clients Twentieth Century Fox Sweden AB, EMI Sweden AB, Universal Music Group Sweden AB, Universal Pictures Nordic AB, Paramount Home Entertainment (Sweden) AB, Atari Nordic AB, Activision Nordic, Ubisoft Sweden AB, Sony BMG Music Entertainment (Sweden) AB, and Sony Pictures Home Entertainment Nordic AB, but the charges were not pursued. MediaDefender’s stocks fell sharply after this incident, and several media companies withdrew from the service after the company announced the leak had caused $825,000 in losses.

Later, The Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde accused police investigator Jim Keyzer of a conflict of interest when he declined to investigate MediaDefender. Keyzer later accepted a job for MPAA member studio Warner Brothers. The leaked emails revealed that other MPAA member studios hired MediaDefender to pollute The Pirate Bay’s torrent database. In an official letter to the Swedish Minister of Justice, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) requested assistance from the Swedish government to prevent The Pirate bay distributing video clips from the Beijing Olympics. The IOC claimed there were more than one million downloads of footage from the Olympics – mostly of the opening ceremony. The Pirate Bay, however, did not take anything down, and temporarily renamed the website to The Beijing Bay.

The trial against the men behind the Pirate Bay started in Sweden on 16 February 2009. They were accused of breaking Swedish copyright law.
The defendants, however, continued to be confident about the outcome. Half the charges against the Pirate Bay were dropped on the second day of the trial.

The three operators of the site and their one investor Carl Lundstrom were convicted in Stockholm district court on 17 April 2009 and sentenced to one year in jail each and a total of 30 million SEK (US$3.6 million, 2.7 million EUR, 2.4 million GBP) in fines and damages. The defendants’ lawyers appealed to the Svea Court of Appeal and requested a retrial in the district court, alleging bias on the part of judge Tomas Norstrom.

On 13 May 2009, several record companies again sued Neij, Svartholm, Sunde and also The Pirate Bay’s main internet service provider Black Internet. They required enforcement for ending The Pirate Bay’s accessory to copyright infringement that had not stopped despite the court order in April, and in the complaint listed several pages of works being shared with the help of the site. The suit was joined by several major film companies on 30 July. The Stockholm district court ruled on 21 August that Black Internet must stop making available the specific works mentioned in the judgment, or face a 500,000 SEK fine. The company was notified of the order on 24 August, and they complied with it on the same day by disconnecting The Pirate Bay. Computer Sweden noted that the judgment did not order The Pirate Bay to be disconnected, but the ISP had no other option for stopping the activity on the site. It was the first time in Sweden for an ISP to be forced to stop providing access for a website. A public support fund fronted by the CEO of the ISP was set up to cover the legal fees of an appeal. Pirate Party leader Rickard Falkvinge submitted the case for Parliamentary Ombudsman review, criticising the court’s order to make intermediaries responsible for relayed content and to assign active crime prevention tasks to a private party.

On 28 October 2009, the Stockholm District Court ordered a temporary injunction on Neij and Svartholm with a penalty of 500,000 SEK each, forbidding them from participating in the operation of The Pirate Bay’s website or trackers.

On 21 May 2010, the Svea Court of Appeal decided not to change the orders on Black Internet or Neij and Svartholm.

On 1 February 2012, the Supreme Court of Sweden refused to hear an appeal in the conviction case, and agreed with the decision of the Svea Court of Appeal, which had upheld the sentences in November 2011.

On 2 September 2012, Pirate Bay co-founder Gottfrid Svartholm Warg was arrested in Cambodia. He was detained in Phnom Penh by officers executing an international warrant issued against him in April after he did not turn up to serve a one-year jail sentence for copyright violations. On 24 December 2012, administrators of TPB changed the homepage to urge users to send Warg, in jail, “gifts and letters”.

In March 2013, The Pirate Bay claimed in a blog post that it had moved its servers to North Korea. The incident turned out to be a hoax. In April 2013, within a week The Pirate Bay had moved its servers from Greenland to Iceland to St. Martin, either in response to legal threats or preemptively. In December 2013, the site changed its domain to .ac (Ascension Island), following the seizure of the .sx domain. On 12 December, the site moved to .pe (Peru), on 18 December to .gy (Guyana). Following the site’s suspension from the .gy domain, on 19 December The Pirate Bay returned to .se (Sweden), which it had previously occupied between February 2012 and April 2013.

The Pirate Bay trial was a joint criminal and civil prosecution in Sweden of four individuals charged for promoting the copyright infringement of others with The Pirate Bay site. The criminal charges were supported by a consortium of intellectual rights holders led by IFPI, who filed individual civil compensation claims against the owners of The Pirate Bay.

Swedish prosecutors filed charges on 31 January 2008 against Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm, and Peter Sunde; and Carl Lundstrom, a Swedish businessman who through his businesses sold services to the site. The prosecutor claimed the four worked together to administer, host, and develop the site and thereby facilitated other people’s breach of copyright law. Some 34 cases of copyright infringements were originally listed, of which 21 were related to music files, 9 to movies, and 4 to games. One case involving music files was later dropped by the copyright holder who made the file available again on The Pirate Bay site. In addition, claims for damages of 117 million kronor (US$13 million, €12.5 million) were filed. The case was decided jointly by a judge and three appointed lay judges. According to Swedish media, the lead judge was involved in one pro-copyright organisation, and on the board of another, but denied that his involvement constituted a conflict of interest.

The trial started on 16 February 2009, in the district court (tingsratt) of Stockholm, Sweden. The hearings ended on 3 March 2009 and the verdict was announced at 11:00 am on Friday 17 April 2009: Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm and Carl Lundstrom were all found guilty and sentenced to serve one year in prison and pay a fine of 30 million Swedish krona (app. €2.7 million or US$3.5 million). All of the defendants appealed the verdict.

The appeal trial concluded on 15 October 2010, and the verdict was announced on 26 November. The appeal court shortened sentences of three of the defendants who appeared in court that day. Neij’s sentence was reduced to 10 months, Sunde’s to eight, and Lundstrom’s to four. However, the fine was increased from 32 to 46 million kronor.

On 1 February 2012, the Supreme Court of Sweden refused to hear an appeal in the case, prompting the site to change its official domain name to thepiratebay.se from thepiratebay.org. The move to a .se domain was claimed to prevent susceptibility to US laws from taking control of the site. On 9 April 2013, the site changed its domain name to thepiratebay.gl, under the Greenland TLD, in anticipation of possible seizure by Swedish authorities of its .se domain. The change proved to be short lived, as the site returned to the .se domain on 12 April 2013 after being blocked on the .gl domain by Tele-Post, which administers domains in Greenland. Tele-Post cited a Danish court ruling that the site was in violation of copyright laws.

Founders Svartholm, Neij, and Sunde were all released after having finished serving their sentences by 2015.

In May 2007, The Pirate Bay was attacked by a group of hackers. They copied the user database, which included over 1.5 million users. The Pirate Bay claimed to its users that the data was of no value and that passwords and e-mails were encrypted and hashed. Some blogs stated that a group known as the AUH (Arga Unga Hackare, Swedish for “Angry Young Hackers”) were suspected of executing the attack; however, the AUH stated on the Computer Sweden newspaper that they were not involved and would take revenge on those responsible for the attack.

On 27 April 2009, the website of The Pirate Bay had fibre IPv4 connectivity issues. There was widespread speculation this was a forced outage from the Swedish anti-piracy group, accelerated somewhat by TPB adding contact details for the Swedish anti-piracy group’s lawyers to its RIPE database record. The site and its forums were still available via IPv6 at the time.

On 24 August 2009, one of The Pirate Bay’s upstream providers was ordered to discontinue service for the website by a Swedish court in response to a civil action brought by several entertainment companies including Disney, Universal, Time Warner, Columbia, Sony, NBC, and Paramount. According to the TPB Blog, this caused a downtime of 3 hours; however, some users were unable to access the site immediately following the relocation due to unrelated technical difficulties. The site was fully operational again for everyone within 24 hours.

On 6 October 2009, one of the IP transit providers to The Pirate Bay blocked all Pirate Bay traffic causing an outage for most users around the world. The same day, the site was reportedly back online at an IP address at CyberBunker, located in the Netherlands. It is not known whether The Pirate Bay is actually located at CyberBunker or whether they are using the CyberBunker service that routes CyberBunker IP addresses to any datacenter around the world. These routes are not visible to the outside world.

CyberBunker was given a court injunction on 17 May 2010, taking the site offline briefly; later that day, hosting was restored by Sweden’s Pirate Party. Former spokesman for the Pirate Bay, Peter Sunde, commented that it would now be very difficult to stop the site because it would now be seen as political censorship if anyone tries to shut it down.

On 8 July 2010, a group of Argentine hackers gained access to The Pirate Bay’s administration panel through a security breach via the backend of The Pirate Bay website. They were able to delete torrents and expose users’ IP-addresses, emails and MD5-hashed passwords. The Pirate Bay was taken offline for upgrades. Users visiting the website were met by the following message: “Upgrading some stuff, database is in use for backups, soon back again. Btw, it’s nice weather outside I think.”

On 16 May 2012, The Pirate Bay experienced a major DDoS attack, causing the site to be largely inaccessible worldwide for around 24 hours. The Pirate Bay said that it did not know who was behind the attack, although it “had its suspicions”.

On 5 May 2015, The Pirate Bay went offline for several hours, apparently as a result of not properly configuring its SSL certificate.

On 30 June 2009, Swedish advertising company Global Gaming Factory X AB announced their intention to buy the site for SEK 60 million (approximately US$8.5 million) (30m SEK in cash, 30m SEK in GGF shares).

The Pirate Bay founders stated that the profits from the sale would be placed in an offshore account where it would be used to fund projects pertaining to “freedom of speech, freedom of information, and the openness of the Internet”. Assurances were made that “no personal data will be transferred in the eventual sale (since no personal data is kept).” Global Gaming Chief Executive Hans Pandeya commented on the site’s future by saying “We would like to introduce models which entail that content providers and copyright owners get paid for content that is downloaded via the site”, and announced that users would be charged a monthly fee for access to The Pirate Bay.

Global Gaming Factory’s letter of intent expired at the end of September 2009, without the transaction having taken place. This may be due to the company’s financial difficulties. “PC World” magazine regarded the deal’s future as “doomed”.

On 9 December 2014, police in Stockholm raided the company’s premises and seized servers and other computers and equipment, which resulted in the website going offline. The raid was in response to a complaint from Rights Alliance, a Swedish anti-piracy group. The Pirate Bay was one of many peer-to-peer and torrent-related websites and apps that went down. One member of the crew was arrested. TorrentFreak reported that most other torrent sites reported a 5-10% increase in traffic from the displaced users, though the shutdown had little effect on overall piracy levels. In retaliation to the raid, a group of hackers claiming to be part of Anonymous allegedly leaked email log-in details of Swedish government officials. The Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde commented in a blog post that he was happy to see the website shut down, believing his successors have done nothing to improve the site, criticising in particular the increased use of advertisements. IsoHunt has since copied much of the original TPB database and made it accessible through oldpiratebay.org, a searchable index of old Pirate Bay torrents. IsoHunt also released a tool called The Open Bay, to allow users to deploy their own version of the Pirate Bay website. The tool is responsible for around 372 mirror sites. Since 17 December 2014, The Pirate Bay’s Facebook page has been unavailable. On 22 December 2014, a website was resumed at the domain thepiratebay.se, showing a flip clock with the length of time in days and hours that the site had been offline, and a waving pirate flag. From this day TPB was hosted for a period in Moldova, on Trabia Network (Moldo-German company) servers. The Pirate Bay then began using the services of CloudFlare, a company which offers reverse proxy services. On 1 January 2015, the website presented a countdown to 1 February 2015. The website returned with a prominent phoenix logo displayed at the domain thepiratebay.se on 31 January 2015.

Beginning in October 2018, the clearnet Pirate Bay website started to be inaccessible in some locations around the world, showing Error 522. As the result, direct visits to the website dropped by more than 32 percent in October. The incident was found to be unrelated to internet provider blocking or domain name problem, but the exact cause has not been determined. The site’s Tor domain and proxies remained unaffected.

The Error 522 problem occurred again in early March 2020, with the site’s admins unable to say when it would be resolved. After one month, the site’s functionality was restored with an update of the domain records and the Cloudflare nameservers.

The Pirate Bay has sparked controversies and discussion about legal aspects of file sharing, copyright, and civil liberties and has become a platform for political initiatives against established intellectual property laws and a central figure in an anti-copyright movement. The website faced several shutdowns and domain seizures which “did little to take the site offline, as it simply switched to a series of new web addresses and continued to operate”.

The Pirate Bay’s website has been blocked in some countries, despite the relative ease by which such blocks can be circumvented in most countries. While the URL to the Pirate Bay itself has been blocked in these countries, numerous mirror websites emerged to make the website available at different URLs, routing traffic around the block.

According to Google chairman Eric Schmidt, “government plans to block access to illicit filesharing websites could set a ‘disastrous precedent’ for freedom of speech”; he also expressed that Google would “fight attempts to restrict access to sites such as the Pirate Bay”.

On 13 February 2017, Sweden’s Patent and Market Court of Appeal decided that the broadband provider Bredbandsbolaget must block its customers from accessing file sharing site The Pirate Bay, overruling a district court ruling to the contrary from 2015. This is the first time a site was openly blocked in Sweden. The rest of the ISPs are expected to follow the same court orders.

After The Pirate Bay introduced a feature in March 2009 to easily share links to torrents on the social networking site Facebook, Wired.com found in May that Facebook had started blocking the links. On further inspection, they discovered that all messages containing links to The Pirate Bay in both public and in private messages, regardless of content, were being blocked. Electronic Frontier Foundation lawyers commented that Facebook might be working against the US Electronic Communications Privacy Act by intercepting user messages, but Facebook chief privacy officer Chris Kelly said that they have the right to use blocks on links where there is a “demonstrated disregard for intellectual property rights”, following users’ agreement on their terms of service. Links to other similar sites have not been blocked.

In March 2012, Microsoft blocked Windows Live Messenger messages if they contain links to The Pirate Bay. When a user sends an instant message that contains a link to The Pirate Bay, Windows Live Messenger prompts a warning and claims “Blocked as it was reported unsafe”. “We block instant messages if they contain malicious or spam URLs based on intelligence algorithms, third-party sources, and/or user complaints. Pirate Bay URLs were flagged by one or more of these and were consequently blocked”, Microsoft told The Register in an emailed statement.

The Pirate Bay is featured in Steal This Film (2006), a documentary series about society and filesharing, produced by The League of Noble Peers; in the Danish Documentary Good Copy Bad Copy, which explores the issues surrounding file copyright; and the documentary TPB AFK. The Pirate Bay has been a topic on the US-syndicated NPR radio show On the Media.

Bjorn Ulvaeus, former member of the Swedish pop music group ABBA, criticised copyright infringing activities of The Pirate Bay supporters as “lazy and mean”. In contrast, Brazilian best-selling author Paulo Coelho has embraced free sharing online. Coelho supports The Pirate Bay and offered to be a witness in the 2009 trial. He accounts much of his growing sales to his work shared on the Internet and comments that “a person who does not share is not only selfish, but bitter and alone”.

URL shortening is a technique on the World Wide Web in which a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) may be made substantially shorter and still direct to the required page. This is achieved by using a redirect which links to the web page that has a long URL. For example, the URL “.mw-parser-output .monospaced{font-family:monospace,monospace}https://example.com/assets/category_B/subcategory_C/Foo/” can be shortened to “https://example.com/Foo”, and the URL “https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URL_shortening” can be shortened to “https://w.wiki/U”. Often the redirect domain name is shorter than the original one. A friendly URL may be desired for messaging technologies that limit the number of characters in a message (for example SMS), for reducing the amount of typing required if the reader is copying a URL from a print source, for making it easier for a person to remember, or for the intention of a permalink. In November 2009, the shortened links of the URL shortening service Bitly were accessed 2.1 billion times.

Other uses of URL shortening are to “beautify” a link, track clicks, or disguise the underlying address. Although disguising of the underlying address may be desired for legitimate business or personal reasons, it is open to abuse. Some URL shortening service providers have found themselves on spam blacklists, because of the use of their redirect services by sites trying to bypass those very same blacklists. Some websites prevent short, redirected URLs from being posted.

There are several reasons to use URL shortening. Often regular unshortened links may be aesthetically unpleasing. Many web developers pass descriptive attributes in the URL to represent data hierarchies, command structures, transaction paths or session information. This can result in URLs that are hundreds of characters long and that contain complex character patterns. Such URLs are difficult to memorize, type out or distribute. As a result, long URLs must be copied and pasted for reliability. Thus, short URLs may be more convenient for websites or hard copy publications (e.g. a printed magazine or a book), the latter often requiring that very long strings be broken into multiple lines (as is the case with some e-mail software or internet forums) or truncated.

On Twitter and some instant messaging services, there is a limit to the number of characters a message can carry – however, Twitter now shortens links automatically using its own URL shortening service, t.co, so there is no need to use a separate URL shortening service just to shorten URLs in a tweet. On other such services, using a URL shortener can allow linking to web pages which would otherwise violate this constraint. Some shortening services, such as goo.gl, tinyurl.com, and bit.ly can generate URLs that are human-readable, although the resulting strings are longer than those generated by a length-optimized service. Finally, URL shortening sites provide detailed information on the clicks a link receives, which can be simpler than setting up an equally powerful server-side analytics engine, and unlike the latter, does not require any access to the server.

URLs encoded in two dimensional barcodes such as QR code are often shortened by a URL shortener in order to reduce the printed area of the code, or allow printing at lower density in order to improve scanning reliability.

Some websites create short links to make sharing links via instant messaging easier, and to make it cheaper to send them via SMS. This can be done online, at the web pages of a URL shortening service; to do it in batch or on demand may require the use of an API.

A few well-known websites have set up their own URL shortening services for their own use – for example, Twitter with t.co, Google with g.co, and GoDaddy with x.co.

In URL shortening, every long URL is associated with a unique key, which is the part after its top-level domain name. For example, https://tinyurl.com/m3q2xt has a key of m3q2xt. Not all redirection is treated equally; the redirection instruction sent to a browser can contain in its header the HTTP status 301 (Moved Permanently), 302 (Found), 307 (Temporary Redirect) or 308 (Permanent Redirect).

There are several techniques to implement a URL shortening. Keys can be generated in base 36, assuming 26 letters and 10 numbers. In this case, each character in the sequence will be 0, 1, 2, …, 9, a, b, c, …, y, z. Alternatively, if uppercase and lowercase letters are differentiated, then each character can represent a single digit within a number of base 62 (26 + 26 + 10). In order to form the key, a hash function can be made, or a random number generated so that key sequence is not predictable. Or users may propose their own custom keys. For example, https://example.com/product?ref=01652&type=shirt can be shortened to https://tinyurl.com/exampleshirt.

Not all URI schemes are capable of being shortened as of 2011, although URI schemes such as http, https, ftp, ftps, mailto, mms, rtmp, rtmpt, ed2k, pop, imap, nntp, news, ldap, gopher, dict and dns are being addressed by such services as URL shorteners. Typically, data: and javascript: URLs are not supported for security reasons (to combat attacks like cross-site scripting and session hijacking). Some URL shortening services support the forwarding of mailto URLs, as an alternative to address munging, to avoid unwanted harvest by web crawlers or bots. This may sometimes be done using short, CAPTCHA-protected URLs, but this is not common.

Makers of URL shorteners usually register domain names with less popular or esoteric Top-level domains in order to achieve a short URL and a catchy name, often using domain hacks.
This results in registration of different URL shorteners with a myriad of different countries, leaving no relation between the country where the domain has been registered and the URL shortener itself or the shortened links. Top-level domains of countries such as Libya (.ly), Samoa (.ws), Mongolia (.mn), Malaysia (.my) and Liechtenstein (.li) have been used as well as many others. In some cases, the political or cultural aspects of the country in charge of the top-level domain may become an issue for users and owners, but this is not usually the case.

Services may record inbound statistics, which may be viewed publicly by others.

Many providers of shortened URLs claim that they will “never expire” (there is always the implied small print: so long as we do not decide to discontinue this service—there is no contract to be breached by a free service, regardless of “promises”—and remain in business).

A permanent URL is not necessarily a good thing. There are security implications, and obsolete short URLs remain in existence and may be circulated long after they cease to point to a relevant or even extant destination. Sometimes a short URL is useful simply to give someone over a telephone conversation for a one-off access or file download, and no longer needed within a couple of minutes.

Some URL shorteners offer a time-limited service, which will expire after a specified period. Services available include an ordinary, easy-to-say word as the URL with a lifetime from 5 minutes up to 24 hours, creation of a URL which will expire on a specified date or after a specified period, creation of a very-short-lived URL of only 5 characters for typing into a smartphone, restriction by the creator of the total number of uses of the URL, and password protection. A Microsoft Security Brief recommends the creation of short-lived URLs, but for reasons explicitly of security rather than convenience.

An early reference is US Patent 6957224, which describes

…a system, method and computer program product for providing links to remotely located information in a network of remotely connected computers. A uniform resource locator (URL) is registered with a server. A shorthand link is associated with the registered URL. The associated shorthand link and URL are logged in a registry database. When a request is received for a shorthand link, the registry database is searched for an associated URL. If the shorthand link is found to be associated with a URL, the URL is fetched, otherwise an error message is returned.

The patent was filed in September 2000; while the patent was issued in 2005, US patent applications are made public within 18 months of filing.

Another reference to URL shortening was in 2001. The first notable URL shortening service, TinyURL, was launched in 2002. Its popularity influenced the creation of at least 100 similar websites, although most are simply domain alternatives. Initially Twitter automatically translated URLs longer than twenty-six characters using TinyURL, although it began using bit.ly instead in 2009 and later developed its own URL shortening service, t.co.

On 14 August 2009 WordPress announced the wp.me URL shortener for use when referring to any WordPress.com blog post. In November 2009, shortened links on bit.ly were accessed 2.1 billion times. Around that time, bit.ly and TinyURL were the most widely used URL-shortening services.

One service, tr.im, stopped generating short URLs in 2009, blaming a lack of revenue-generating mechanisms to cover costs and Twitter’s default use of the bit.ly shortener, and questioning whether other shortening services could be profitable from URL shortening in the longer term. It resumed for a time, then closed.

The shortest possible long-term URLs were generated by NanoURL from December 2009 until about 2011, associated with the top-level .to (Tonga) domain, in the form http://to./xxxx, where xxxx represents a sequence of random numbers and letters.

On December 14, 2009 Google announced a service called Google URL Shortener at goo.gl, which originally was only available for use through Google products (such as Google Toolbar and FeedBurner) and extensions for Google Chrome. On 21 December 2009, Google introduced a YouTube URL Shortener, youtu.be. From September 2010 Google URL Shortener became available via a direct interface. The goo.gl service provides analytics details and a QR code generator. On 30 March 2018 Google announced that it is “turning down support for goo.gl over the coming weeks and replacing it with Firebase Dynamic Links” (although existing goo.gl links will continue to function).

The main advantage of a short link is that it is, in fact, short, looks neat and clean and can be easily communicated and entered without error. To a very limited extent it may obscure the destination of the URL, though easily discoverable; this may be advantageous, disadvantageous, or irrelevant. A short link which expires, or can be terminated, has some security advantages.

Short URLs often circumvent the intended use of top-level domains for indicating the country of origin; domain registration in many countries requires proof of physical presence within that country, although a redirected URL has no such guarantee.

URL shortening may be utilized by spammers or for illicit internet activities. As a result, many have been removed from online registries or shut down by web hosts or internet service providers.

According to Tonic Corporation, the registry for .to domains, it is “very serious about keeping domains spam free” and may remove URL shortening services from their registry if the service is abused.

In addition, “u.nu” made the following announcement upon closing operations:

The last straw came on September 3, 2010, when the server was disconnected without notice by our hosting provider in response to reports of a number of links to child pornography sites. The disconnection of the server caused us serious problems, and to be honest, the level and nature of the abuse has become quite demoralizing. Given the choice between spending time and money to find a different home, or just giving up, the latter won out.

Google’s url-shortener discussion group has frequently included messages from frustrated users reporting that specific shortened URLs have been disabled after they were reported as spam.

A study in May 2012 showed that 61% of URL shorteners had shut down (614 of 1002). The most common cause cited was abuse by spammers.

The convenience offered by URL shortening also introduces potential problems, which have led to criticism of the use of these services. Short URLs, for example, will be subject to linkrot if the shortening service stops working; all URLs related to the service will become broken. It is a legitimate concern that many existing URL shortening services may not have a sustainable business model in the long term. In late 2009, the Internet Archive started the “301 Works” projects, together with twenty collaborating companies (initially), whose short URLs will be preserved by the project.

Shortened internet links typically use ccTLD domains, and are therefore often under the jurisdiction of a nation other than where the service provider is located. Libya, for instance, exercised its control over the .ly domain in October 2010 to shut down vb.ly for violating Libyan pornography laws. Failure to predict such problems with URL shorteners and investment in URL shortening companies may reflect a lack of due diligence.

Some websites prevent short, redirected URLs from being posted.

In April 2009, TinyURL was reported to be blocked in Saudi Arabia. Yahoo! Answers blocks postings that contain TinyURLs, and Wikipedia does not accept links by any URL shortening services in its articles. The Reddit community strongly discourages – and in some subreddits, outright bans – URL shortening services for link submissions, because they disguise the origin domain name and whether the link has previously been submitted to Reddit, and there are few or no legitimate reasons to use link shorteners for Reddit link submissions.

Sites such as Adf.ly use a number of advertising techniques, including interstitial advertising, to generate revenue.

A short URL obscures the target address and can be used to redirect to an unexpected site. Examples of this are “rickrolling”, and redirecting to shock sites, or to affiliate websites. The short URL can allow blacklisted URLs to be accessed, bypassing site blocks; this facilitates redirection of a user to blacklisted scam pages or pages containing malware or XSS attacks. TinyURL tries to disable spam-related links from redirecting. ZoneAlarm, however, has warned its users: “TinyURL may be unsafe. This website has been known to distribute spyware.” TinyURL countered this problem by offering an option to view a link’s destination before using a shortened URL. This ability is installed on the browser via the TinyURL website and requires the use of cookies. A destination preview may also be obtained by prefixing the word “preview” to the TinyURL URL; for example, the destination of https://tinyurl.com/8kmfp is revealed by entering https://preview.tinyurl.com/8kmfp. Other URL shortening services provide a similar destination display. Security professionals suggest that users check a short URL’s destination before accessing it, following an instance where the shortening service cli.gs was compromised, exposing millions of users to security uncertainties. There are several web applications that can display the destination URL of a shortened URL.

Some URL shortening services filter their links through bad-site screening services such as Google Safe Browsing. Many sites that accept user-submitted content block links, however, to certain domains in order to cut down on spam, and for this reason, known URL redirection services are often themselves added to spam blacklists.

Another privacy problem is that many services’ shortened URL format is small enough that it is vulnerable to brute-force search. Many people use URL shorteners when they share links to private content, and in fact many web services like Google Maps have offered automatic generation of shortened links for driving directions that reveal personal information like home addresses and sensitive destinations like “clinics for specific diseases (including cancer and mental diseases), addiction treatment centers, abortion providers, correctional and juvenile detention facilities, payday and car-title lenders, gentlemen’s clubs, etc.”

Short URLs, although making it easier to access what might otherwise be a very long URL or user-space on an ISP server, add an additional layer of complexity to the process of retrieving web pages. Every access requires more requests (at least one more DNS lookup, though it may be cached, and one more HTTP/HTTPS request), thereby increasing latency, the time taken to access the page, and also the risk of failure, since the shortening service may become unavailable. Another operational limitation of URL shortening services is that browsers do not resend POST bodies when a redirect is encountered. This can be overcome by making the service a reverse proxy, or by elaborate schemes involving cookies and buffered POST bodies, but such techniques present security and scaling challenges, and are therefore not used on extranets or Internet-scale services.[original research?]

Open source and commercial scripts are also available for redirecting and shortening links, usually written in PHP as a web application or a plugin for one of the popular applications such as WordPress. Such scripts avoid many issues with shortening services, keep the domain name as part of the shortened link, and can be made private.

Craigslist (stylized as craigslist) is an American classified advertisements website with sections devoted to jobs, housing, for sale, items wanted, services, community service, gigs, resumes, and discussion forums.

Craig Newmark began the service in 1995 as an email distribution list to friends, featuring local events in the San Francisco Bay Area. It became a web-based service in 1996 and expanded into other classified categories. It started expanding to other U.S. and Canadian cities in 2000, and now covers 70 countries.

In March 2008, Spanish, French, Italian, German, and Portuguese became the first non-English languages Craigslist supported. As of August 9, 2012, over 700 cities and areas in 70 countries had Craigslist sites. Some Craigslist sites cover large regions instead of individual metropolitan areas—for example, the U.S. states of Delaware and Wyoming, the Colorado Western Slope, the California Gold Country, and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan are among the locations with their own Craigslist sites. Craigslist sites for some large cities, such as Los Angeles, also include the ability for the user to focus on a specific area of a city (such as central Los Angeles).

Having observed people helping one another in friendly, social, and trusting communal ways on the Internet via the WELL, MindVox and Usenet, and feeling isolated as a relative newcomer to San Francisco, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark decided to create something similar for local events. In early 1995, he began an email distribution list to friends. Most of the early postings were submitted by Newmark and were notices of social events of interest to software and Internet developers living and working in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Soon, word of mouth led to rapid growth. The number of subscribers and postings grew rapidly. There was no moderation and Newmark was surprised when people started using the mailing list for non-event postings. People trying to get technical positions filled found that the list was a good way to reach people with the skills they were looking for. This led to the addition of a jobs category. User demand for more categories caused the list of categories to grow. The initial technology encountered some limits, so by June 1995 Majordomo had been installed and the mailing list “Craigslist” resumed operations. Community members started asking for a web interface. Newmark registered “craigslist.org”, and the website went live in 1996.

In the fall of 1998, the name “List Foundation” was introduced and Craigslist started transitioning to the use of this name. In April 1999, when Newmark learned of other organizations called “List Foundation”, the use of this name was dropped. Craigslist incorporated as a private for-profit company in 1999. Around the time of these events, Newmark realized the site was growing so fast that he could stop working as a software engineer and devote his full attention to running Craigslist. By April 2000, there were nine employees working out of Newmark’s San Francisco apartment.

In January 2000, current CEO Jim Buckmaster joined the company as lead programmer and CTO. Buckmaster contributed the site’s multi-city architecture, search engine, discussion forums, flagging system, self-posting process, homepage design, personals categories, and best-of-Craigslist feature. He was promoted to CEO in November 2000.

The website expanded into nine more U.S. cities in 2000, four in 2001 and 2002 each, and 14 in 2003. On August 1, 2004, Craigslist began charging $25 to post job openings on the New York and Los Angeles pages. On the same day, a new section called “Gigs” was added, where low-cost and unpaid jobs can be posted free.

The site serves more than 20 billion page views per month, putting it in 72nd place overall among websites worldwide and 11th place overall among websites in the United States (per Alexa.com on June 28, 2016), with more than 49.4 million unique monthly visitors in the United States alone (per Compete.com on January 8, 2010). With more than 80 million new classified advertisements each month, Craigslist is the leading classifieds service in any medium.

The site receives more than 2 million new job listings each month, making it one of the top job boards in the world. The 23 largest U.S. cities listed on the Craigslist home page collectively receive more than 300,000 postings per day just in the “for sale” and “housing” sections as of October 2011. The classified advertisements range from traditional buy/sell ads and community announcements to personal ads.

In 2009, Craigslist operated with a staff of 28 people.

In December 2006, at the UBS Global Media Conference in New York, Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster told Wall Street analysts that Craigslist had little interest in maximizing profit, and instead preferred to help users find cars, apartments, jobs and dates.

Craigslist’s main source of revenue is paid job ads in select American cities. The company does not formally disclose financial or ownership information. Analysts and commentators have reported varying figures for its annual revenue, ranging from $10 million in 2004, $20 million in 2005, and $25 million in 2006 to possibly $150 million in 2007. Fortune has described their revenue model as “quasi-socialist”, citing their focus on features for users regardless of profitability. Eric Baker of StubHub has described the site as a “potential gold mine of revenue, if only it would abandon its communist manifesto.”

On August 13, 2004, Newmark announced on his blog that auction giant eBay had purchased a 25% stake in the company from a former employee. Some fans of Craigslist expressed concern that this development would affect the site’s longtime non-commercial nature. As of April 2012[update], there have been no substantive changes to the usefulness, or the non-advertising nature of the site; neither banner ads, nor charges for a few services provided to businesses.

The company was believed to be owned principally by Newmark, Buckmaster and eBay (the three board members). eBay owned approximately 25%, and Newmark is believed to own the largest stake.

In April 2008, eBay announced it was suing Craigslist to “safeguard its four-year financial investment”. eBay claimed that in January 2008, Craigslist executives took actions that “unfairly diluted eBay’s economic interest by more than 10%”. Craigslist filed a counter-suit in May 2008 to “remedy the substantial and ongoing harm to fair competition” that Craigslist claimed was constituted by eBay’s actions as Craigslist shareholders; the company claimed that it had used its minority stake to gain access to confidential information, which it then used as part of its competing service Kijiji.

On June 19, 2015, eBay Inc. announced that it would divest its stake back to Craigslist for an undisclosed amount, and settle its litigation with the company. The move came shortly before eBay’s planned spin-off of PayPal, and an effort to divest other units to focus on its core business.

The Swedish luxury marketplace website Jameslist.com received a lawsuit filed on July 11, 2012 which among unspecified damages also asked for a complete shutdown of Jameslist.com As a consequence, the young company was forced to rename to JamesEdition.

As of 2012, mashup sites such as padmapper.com and housingmaps.com were overlaying Craigslist data with Google Maps and adding their own search filters to improve usability. In June 2012, Craigslist changed its terms of service to disallow the practice. In July 2012, Craigslist filed a lawsuit against padmapper.com. Following the shutdown of Padmapper.com, some users complained that the service was useful to them and therefore should have remained intact.

In December 2019, Craigslist introduced a platform for iOS and a beta version on Android.

Over the years Craigslist has become a very popular online destination for arranging for dates and sex. The personals section allows for postings that are for “strictly platonic”, “dating/romance”, and “casual encounters”.

The site is considered particularly useful by lesbians and gay men seeking to make connections, because of the service’s free and open nature and because of the difficulty of otherwise finding each other in more conservative areas.

In 2005, San Francisco Craigslist’s men seeking men section was attributed to facilitating sexual encounters and was the second most common correlation to syphilis infections. The company has been pressured by San Francisco Department of Public Health officials, prompting Jim Buckmaster to state that the site has a very small staff and that the public “must police themselves”. The site has, however, added links to San Francisco City Clinic and STD forums.

On March 22, 2018, Craigslist discontinued its “Personals” section in the United States in response to the passing of the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA), which removes Section 230 safe harbours for interactive services knowingly involved in illegal sex trafficking. The service stated that

US Congress just passed HR 1865, ‘FOSTA’, seeking to subject websites to criminal and civil liability when third parties (users) misuse online personals unlawfully. Any tool or service can be misused. We can’t take such risk without jeopardizing all our other services, so we are regretfully taking craigslist personals offline. To the millions of spouses, partners, and couples who met through craigslist, we wish you every happiness!

Advertisements for “adult” (previously “erotic”) services were initially given special treatment, then closed entirely on September 4, 2010, following a controversy over claims by state attorneys general that the advertisements promoted prostitution.

In 2002, a disclaimer was put on the “men seeking men”, “casual encounters”, “erotic services”, and “rants and raves” boards to ensure that those who clicked on these sections were over the age of 18, but no disclaimer was put on the “men seeking women”, “women seeking men” or “women seeking women” boards. As a response to charges of discrimination and negative stereotyping, Buckmaster explained that the company’s policy is a response to user feedback requesting the warning on the more sexually explicit sections, including “men seeking men”.

On May 13, 2009, Craigslist announced that it would close the erotic services section, replacing it with an adult services section to be reviewed by Craigslist employees. This decision came after allegations by several U.S. states that the erotic services ads were being used for prostitution.

On September 4, 2010, Craigslist closed the adult services section of its website in the United States. The site initially replaced the adult services page link with the word “censored” in white-on-black text. The site received criticism and complaints from attorneys general that the section’s ads were facilitating prostitution and child sex trafficking.

The adult services section link was still active in countries outside of the U.S. Matt Zimmerman, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said, “Craigslist isn’t legally culpable for these posts, but the public pressure has increased and Craigslist is a small company.” Brian Carver, attorney and assistant professor at UC Berkeley, said that legal threats could have a chilling effect on online expression. “If you impose liability on Craigslist, YouTube and Facebook for anything their users do, then they’re not going to take chances. It would likely result in the takedown of what might otherwise be perfectly legitimate free expression.”

On September 8, 2010, the “censored” label and its dead link to adult services were completely removed.

Craigslist announced on September 15, 2010, that it had closed its adult services in the United States; however, it defended its right to carry such ads. Free speech and some sex crime victim advocates criticized the removal of the section, saying that it threatened free speech and that it diminished law enforcement’s ability to track criminals. However, the removal was applauded by many state attorneys general and some other groups fighting sex crimes. Craigslist said that there is some indication that those who posted ads in the adult services section are posting elsewhere. Sex ads had cost $10 initially and it was estimated they would have brought in $44 million in 2010 had they continued. In the four months following the closure, monthly revenue from sex ads on six other sites (primarily Backpage) increased from $2.1 to $3.1 million, partly due to price increases.

The company makes efforts to fight prostitution and sex trafficking, and in 2015, Craig Newmark received an award from the FBI for cooperation with law enforcement to fight human trafficking.

On December 19, 2010, after pressure from Ottawa and several provinces, Craigslist closed ‘Erotic Services’ and ‘Adult Gigs’ from its Canadian website, even though prostitution was not itself illegal in Canada at the time.

When the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act was signed into law on April 11, 2018, Craigslist chose to close its “Personals” section within all US domains to avoid civil lawsuits. About their decision, Craigslist stated “Any tool or service can be misused. We can’t take such risk without jeopardizing all our other services.”

Craigslist has a user flagging system to quickly identify illegal and inappropriate postings. Users may flag postings they believe to be in violation of Craigslist guidelines.

Flagging does not require account login or registration, and can be done anonymously by anyone. Postings are subject to automated removal when a certain number of users flag them. The number of flags required for a posting’s removal is dynamically variable and remains unknown to all but Craigslist staff. Some users allege that flagging may also occur as acts of vandalism by groups of individuals at different ISPs, but no evidence of this has ever been shown. Flagging can also alert Craigslist staff to blocks of ads requiring manual oversight or removal.

Flagging is also done by Craigslist itself (Craigslist’s automated systems) and the posts will never appear on the search results.

Craigslist includes a barter option in its “for sale” section. This growing trade economy has been documented on the television program Barter Kings and the blog one red paperclip.

In July 2005, the San Francisco Chronicle criticized Craigslist for allowing ads from dog breeders, stating that this could encourage the over-breeding and irresponsible selling of pit bulls in the Bay Area. According to Craigslist’s terms of service, the sale of pets is prohibited, though re-homing with small adoption fees is acceptable.

In January 2006, the San Francisco Bay Guardian published an editorial claiming that Craigslist could threaten the business of local alternative newspapers.

L. Gordon Crovitz, writing for The Wall Street Journal, criticized the company for using lawsuits “to prevent anyone from doing to it what it did to newspapers”, contrary to the spirit of the website, which bills itself in a “noncommercial nature, public service mission, and noncorporate culture”.
This article was a reaction to lawsuits from Craigslist which Crovitz says were intended to prevent competition. Craigslist filed a trademark lawsuit against the Swedish luxury marketplace website Jameslist.com on July 11, 2012, forcing the company to rename to JamesEdition.

In 2012, Craigslist sued PadMapper, a site that hoped to improve the user interface for browsing housing ads, and 3Taps, a company that helped PadMapper obtain data from Craigslist, in Craigslist v. 3Taps. This led users to criticize Craigslist for trying to shut down a service that was useful to them.

In 2001, the company started the Craigslist Foundation, a § 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that offers free and low-cost events and online resources to promote community building at all levels. It accepts charitable donations, and rather than directly funding organizations, it produces “face-to-face events and offers online resources to help grassroots organizations get off the ground and contribute real value to the community”.

Since 2004, the Craigslist Foundation has hosted eight annual conferences called Boot Camp, an in-person event that focuses on skills for connecting, motivating and inspiring greater community involvement and impact.

The Craigslist Foundation is also the fiscal sponsor for Our Good Works, the organization that manages AllforGood.org, an application that distributes volunteer opportunities across the web and helps people get involved in their communities.

As of summer 2013, the Craigslist Foundation’s functions are mostly moved to LikeMinded.org and the CraigsListFoundation.org is no longer updated.

Internet access is the ability of individuals and organizations to connect to the Internet using computer terminals, computers, and other devices; and to access services such as email and the World Wide Web. Internet access is sold by Internet service providers (ISPs) delivering connectivity at a wide range of data transfer rates via various networking technologies. Many organizations, including a growing number of municipal entities, also provide cost-free wireless access and landlines.

Availability of Internet access was once limited, but has grown rapidly. In 1995, only 0.04 percent of the world’s population had access, with well over half of those living in the United States, and consumer use was through dial-up. By the first decade of the 21st century, many consumers in developed nations used faster broadband technology, and by 2014, 41 percent of the world’s population had access, broadband was almost ubiquitous worldwide, and global average connection speeds exceeded one megabit per second.

The Internet developed from the ARPANET, which was funded by the US government to support projects within the government and at universities and research laboratories in the US – but grew over time to include most of the world’s large universities and the research arms of many technology companies. Use by a wider audience only came in 1995 when restrictions on the use of the Internet to carry commercial traffic were lifted.

In the early to mid-1980s, most Internet access was from personal computers and workstations directly connected to local area networks or from dial-up connections using modems and analog telephone lines. LANs typically operated at 10 Mbit/s, while modem data-rates grew from 1200 bit/s in the early 1980s, to 56 kbit/s by the late 1990s. Initially, dial-up connections were made from terminals or computers running terminal emulation software to terminal servers on LANs. These dial-up connections did not support end-to-end use of the Internet protocols and only provided terminal to host connections. The introduction of network access servers supporting the Serial Line Internet Protocol (SLIP) and later the point-to-point protocol (PPP) extended the Internet protocols and made the full range of Internet services available to dial-up users; although slower, due to the lower data rates available using dial-up.

An important factor in the rapid rise of Internet access speed has been advances in MOSFET (MOS transistor) technology. The MOSFET, originally invented by Mohamed Atalla and Dawon Kahng in 1959, is the building block of the Internet telecommunications networks. The laser, originally demonstrated by Charles H. Townes and Arthur Leonard Schawlow in 1960, was adopted for MOS light wave systems around 1980, which led to exponential growth of Internet bandwidth. Continuous MOSFET scaling has since led to online bandwidth doubling every 18 months (Edholm’s law, which is related to Moore’s law), with the bandwidths of online communication networks rising from bits per second to terabits per second.

Broadband Internet access, often shortened to just broadband, is simply defined as “Internet access that is always on, and faster than the traditional dial-up access” and so covers a wide range of technologies. The core of these broadband Internet technologies are complementary MOS (CMOS) digital circuits, the speed capabilities of which were extended with innovative design techniques. Broadband connections are typically made using a computer’s built in Ethernet networking capabilities, or by using a NIC expansion card.

Most broadband services provide a continuous “always on” connection; there is no dial-in process required, and it does not interfere with voice use of phone lines. Broadband provides improved access to Internet services such as:

In the 1990s, the National Information Infrastructure initiative in the U.S. made broadband Internet access a public policy issue. In 2000, most Internet access to homes was provided using dial-up, while many businesses and schools were using broadband connections. In 2000 there were just under 150 million dial-up subscriptions in the 34 OECD countries and fewer than 20 million broadband subscriptions. By 2005, broadband had grown and dial-up had declined so that the number of subscriptions were roughly equal at 130 million each. In 2010, in the OECD countries, over 90% of the Internet access subscriptions used broadband, broadband had grown to more than 300 million subscriptions, and dial-up subscriptions had declined to fewer than 30 million.

The broadband technologies in widest use are ADSL and cable Internet access. Newer technologies include VDSL and optical fibre extended closer to the subscriber in both telephone and cable plants. Fibre-optic communication, while only recently being used in premises and to the curb schemes, has played a crucial role in enabling broadband Internet access by making transmission of information at very high data rates over longer distances much more cost-effective than copper wire technology.

In areas not served by ADSL or cable, some community organizations and local governments are installing Wi-Fi networks. Wireless, satellite and microwave Internet are often used in rural, undeveloped, or other hard to serve areas where wired Internet is not readily available.

Newer technologies being deployed for fixed (stationary) and mobile broadband access include WiMAX, LTE, and fixed wireless.

Starting in roughly 2006, mobile broadband access is increasingly available at the consumer level using “3G” and “4G” technologies such as HSPA, EV-DO, HSPA+, and LTE.

In addition to access from home, school, and the workplace Internet access may be available from public places such as libraries and Internet cafes, where computers with Internet connections are available. Some libraries provide stations for physically connecting users’ laptops to local area networks (LANs).

Wireless Internet access points are available in public places such as airport halls, in some cases just for brief use while standing. Some access points may also provide coin-operated computers. Various terms are used, such as “public Internet kiosk”, “public access terminal”, and “Web payphone”. Many hotels also have public terminals, usually fee based.

Coffee shops, shopping malls, and other venues increasingly offer wireless access to computer networks, referred to as hotspots, for users who bring their own wireless-enabled devices such as a laptop or PDA. These services may be free to all, free to customers only, or fee-based. A Wi-Fi hotspot need not be limited to a confined location since multiple ones combined can cover a whole campus or park, or even an entire city can be enabled.

Additionally, Mobile broadband access allows smart phones and other digital devices to connect to the Internet from any location from which a mobile phone call can be made, subject to the capabilities of that mobile network.

The bit rates for dial-up modems range from as little as 110 bit/s in the late 1950s, to a maximum of from 33 to 64 kbit/s (V.90 and V.92) in the late 1990s. Dial-up connections generally require the dedicated use of a telephone line. Data compression can boost the effective bit rate for a dial-up modem connection from 220 (V.42bis) to 320 (V.44) kbit/s. However, the effectiveness of data compression is quite variable, depending on the type of data being sent, the condition of the telephone line, and a number of other factors. In reality, the overall data rate rarely exceeds 150 kbit/s.

Broadband technologies supply considerably higher bit rates than dial-up, generally without disrupting regular telephone use. Various minimum data rates and maximum latencies have been used in definitions of broadband, ranging from 64 kbit/s up to 4.0 Mbit/s. In 1988 the CCITT standards body defined “broadband service” as requiring transmission channels capable of supporting bit rates greater than the primary rate which ranged from about 1.5 to 2 Mbit/s. A 2006 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) report defined broadband as having download data transfer rates equal to or faster than 256 kbit/s. And in 2015 the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) defined “Basic Broadband” as data transmission speeds of at least 25 Mbit/s downstream (from the Internet to the user’s computer) and 3 Mbit/s upstream (from the user’s computer to the Internet). The trend is to raise the threshold of the broadband definition as higher data rate services become available.

The higher data rate dial-up modems and many broadband services are “asymmetric”—supporting much higher data rates for download (toward the user) than for upload (toward the Internet).

Data rates, including those given in this article, are usually defined and advertised in terms of the maximum or peak download rate. In practice, these maximum data rates are not always reliably available to the customer. Actual end-to-end data rates can be lower due to a number of factors. In late June 2016, internet connection speeds averaged about 6 Mbit/s globally. Physical link quality can vary with distance and for wireless access with terrain, weather, building construction, antenna placement, and interference from other radio sources. Network bottlenecks may exist at points anywhere on the path from the end-user to the remote server or service being used and not just on the first or last link providing Internet access to the end-user.

Users may share access over a common network infrastructure. Since most users do not use their full connection capacity all of the time, this aggregation strategy (known as contended service) usually works well, and users can burst to their full data rate at least for brief periods. However, peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing and high-quality streaming video can require high data-rates for extended periods, which violates these assumptions and can cause a service to become oversubscribed, resulting in congestion and poor performance. The TCP protocol includes flow-control mechanisms that automatically throttle back on the bandwidth being used during periods of network congestion. This is fair in the sense that all users that experience congestion receive less bandwidth, but it can be frustrating for customers and a major problem for ISPs. In some cases the amount of bandwidth actually available may fall below the threshold required to support a particular service such as video conferencing or streaming live video-effectively making the service unavailable.

When traffic is particularly heavy, an ISP can deliberately throttle back the bandwidth available to classes of users or for particular services. This is known as traffic shaping and careful use can ensure a better quality of service for time critical services even on extremely busy networks. However, overuse can lead to concerns about fairness and network neutrality or even charges of censorship, when some types of traffic are severely or completely blocked.

An Internet blackout or outage can be caused by local signaling interruptions. Disruptions of submarine communications cables may cause blackouts or slowdowns to large areas, such as in the 2008 submarine cable disruption. Less-developed countries are more vulnerable due to a small number of high-capacity links. Land cables are also vulnerable, as in 2011 when a woman digging for scrap metal severed most connectivity for the nation of Armenia. Internet blackouts affecting almost entire countries can be achieved by governments as a form of Internet censorship, as in the blockage of the Internet in Egypt, whereby approximately 93% of networks were without access in 2011 in an attempt to stop mobilization for anti-government protests.

On April 25, 1997, due to a combination of human error and software bug, an incorrect routing table at MAI Network Service (a Virginia Internet service provider) propagated across backbone routers and caused major disruption to Internet traffic for a few hours.

When the Internet is accessed using a modem, digital data is converted to analog for transmission over analog networks such as the telephone and cable networks. A computer or other device accessing the Internet would either be connected directly to a modem that communicates with an Internet service provider (ISP) or the modem’s Internet connection would be shared via a Local Area Network (LAN) which provides access in a limited area such as a home, school, computer laboratory, or office building.

Although a connection to a LAN may provide very high data-rates within the LAN, actual Internet access speed is limited by the upstream link to the ISP. LANs may be wired or wireless. Ethernet over twisted pair cabling and Wi-Fi are the two most common technologies used to build LANs today, but ARCNET, Token Ring, Localtalk, FDDI, and other technologies were used in the past.

Ethernet is the name of the IEEE 802.3 standard for physical LAN communication and Wi-Fi is a trade name for a wireless local area network (WLAN) that uses one of the IEEE 802.11 standards. Ethernet cables are interconnected via switches & routers. Wi-Fi networks are built using one or more wireless antenna called access points.

Many “modems” (cable modems, DSL gateways or Optical Network Terminals (ONTs) provide the additional functionality to host a LAN so most Internet access today is through a LAN such as that created by a WiFi router connected to a modem or a combo modem router, often a very small LAN with just one or two devices attached. And while LANs are an important form of Internet access, this raises the question of how and at what data rate the LAN itself is connected to the rest of the global Internet. The technologies described below are used to make these connections, or in other words, how customers’ modems (Customer-premises equipment) are most often connected to internet service providers (ISPs).

Dial-up Internet access uses a modem and a phone call placed over the public switched telephone network (PSTN) to connect to a pool of modems operated by an ISP. The modem converts a computer’s digital signal into an analog signal that travels over a phone line’s local loop until it reaches a telephone company’s switching facilities or central office (CO) where it is switched to another phone line that connects to another modem at the remote end of the connection.

Operating on a single channel, a dial-up connection monopolizes the phone line and is one of the slowest methods of accessing the Internet. Dial-up is often the only form of Internet access available in rural areas as it requires no new infrastructure beyond the already existing telephone network, to connect to the Internet. Typically, dial-up connections do not exceed a speed of 56 kbit/s, as they are primarily made using modems that operate at a maximum data rate of 56 kbit/s downstream (towards the end user) and 34 or 48 kbit/s upstream (toward the global Internet).

Multilink dial-up provides increased bandwidth by channel bonding multiple dial-up connections and accessing them as a single data channel. It requires two or more modems, phone lines, and dial-up accounts, as well as an ISP that supports multilinking – and of course any line and data charges are also doubled. This inverse multiplexing option was briefly popular with some high-end users before ISDN, DSL and other technologies became available. Diamond and other vendors created special modems to support multilinking.

The term broadband includes a broad range of technologies, all of which provide higher data rate access to the Internet. The following technologies use wires or cables in contrast to wireless broadband described later.

Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) is a switched telephone service capable of transporting voice and digital data, and is one of the oldest Internet access methods. ISDN has been used for voice, video conferencing, and broadband data applications. ISDN was very popular in Europe, but less common in North America. Its use peaked in the late 1990s before the availability of DSL and cable modem technologies.

Basic rate ISDN, known as ISDN-BRI, has two 64 kbit/s “bearer” or “B” channels. These channels can be used separately for voice or data calls or bonded together to provide a 128 kbit/s service. Multiple ISDN-BRI lines can be bonded together to provide data rates above 128 kbit/s. Primary rate ISDN, known as ISDN-PRI, has 23 bearer channels (64 kbit/s each) for a combined data rate of 1.5 Mbit/s (US standard). An ISDN E1 (European standard) line has 30 bearer channels and a combined data rate of 1.9 Mbit/s.

Leased lines are dedicated lines used primarily by ISPs, business, and other large enterprises to connect LANs and campus networks to the Internet using the existing infrastructure of the public telephone network or other providers. Delivered using wire, optical fiber, and radio, leased lines are used to provide Internet access directly as well as the building blocks from which several other forms of Internet access are created.

T-carrier technology dates to 1957 and provides data rates that range from 56 and 64 kbit/s (DS0) to 1.5 Mbit/s (DS1 or T1), to 45 Mbit/s (DS3 or T3). A T1 line carries 24 voice or data channels (24 DS0s), so customers may use some channels for data and others for voice traffic or use all 24 channels for clear channel data. A DS3 (T3) line carries 28 DS1 (T1) channels. Fractional T1 lines are also available in multiples of a DS0 to provide data rates between 56 and 1500 kbit/s. T-carrier lines require special termination equipment that may be separate from or integrated into a router or switch and which may be purchased or leased from an ISP. In Japan the equivalent standard is J1/J3. In Europe, a slightly different standard, E-carrier, provides 32 user channels (64 kbit/s) on an E1 (2.0 Mbit/s) and 512 user channels or 16 E1s on an E3 (34.4 Mbit/s).

Synchronous Optical Networking (SONET, in the U.S. and Canada) and Synchronous Digital Hierarchy (SDH, in the rest of the world) are the standard multiplexing protocols used to carry high-data-rate digital bit-streams over optical fiber using lasers or highly coherent light from light-emitting diodes (LEDs). At lower transmission rates data can also be transferred via an electrical interface. The basic unit of framing is an OC-3c (optical) or STS-3c (electrical) which carries 155.520 Mbit/s. Thus an OC-3c will carry three OC-1 (51.84 Mbit/s) payloads each of which has enough capacity to include a full DS3. Higher data rates are delivered in OC-3c multiples of four providing OC-12c (622.080 Mbit/s), OC-48c (2.488 Gbit/s), OC-192c (9.953 Gbit/s), and OC-768c (39.813 Gbit/s). The “c” at the end of the OC labels stands for “concatenated” and indicates a single data stream rather than several multiplexed data streams.

The 1, 10, 40, and 100 gigabit Ethernet (GbE, 10 GbE, 40/100 GbE) IEEE standards (802.3) allow digital data to be delivered over copper wiring at distances to 100 m and over optical fiber at distances to 40 km.

Cable Internet provides access using a cable modem on hybrid fiber coaxial wiring originally developed to carry television signals. Either fiber-optic or coaxial copper cable may connect a node to a customer’s location at a connection known as a cable drop. In a cable modem termination system, all nodes for cable subscribers in a neighborhood connect to a cable company’s central office, known as the “head end.” The cable company then connects to the Internet using a variety of means – usually fiber optic cable or digital satellite and microwave transmissions. Like DSL, broadband cable provides a continuous connection with an ISP.

Downstream, the direction toward the user, bit rates can be as much as 1000 Mbit/s in some countries, with the use of DOCSIS 3.1. Upstream traffic, originating at the user, ranges from 384 kbit/s to more than 50 Mbit/s. DOCSIS 4.0 promises up to 10 Gbit/s downstream ands 6 Gbit/s upstream, however this technology is yet to have been implemented in real world usage. Broadband cable access tends to service fewer business customers because existing television cable networks tend to service residential buildings; commercial buildings do not always include wiring for coaxial cable networks. In addition, because broadband cable subscribers share the same local line, communications may be intercepted by neighboring subscribers. Cable networks regularly provide encryption schemes for data traveling to and from customers, but these schemes may be thwarted.

Digital subscriber line (DSL) service provides a connection to the Internet through the telephone network. Unlike dial-up, DSL can operate using a single phone line without preventing normal use of the telephone line for voice phone calls. DSL uses the high frequencies, while the low (audible) frequencies of the line are left free for regular telephone communication. These frequency bands are subsequently separated by filters installed at the customer’s premises.

DSL originally stood for “digital subscriber loop”. In telecommunications marketing, the term digital subscriber line is widely understood to mean asymmetric digital subscriber line (ADSL), the most commonly installed variety of DSL. The data throughput of consumer DSL services typically ranges from 256 kbit/s to 20 Mbit/s in the direction to the customer (downstream), depending on DSL technology, line conditions, and service-level implementation. In ADSL, the data throughput in the upstream direction, (i.e., in the direction to the service provider) is lower than that in the downstream direction (i.e. to the customer), hence the designation of asymmetric. With a symmetric digital subscriber line (SDSL), the downstream and upstream data rates are equal.

Very-high-bit-rate digital subscriber line (VDSL or VHDSL, ITU G.993.1) is a digital subscriber line (DSL) standard approved in 2001 that provides data rates up to 52 Mbit/s downstream and 16 Mbit/s upstream over copper wires and up to 85 Mbit/s down- and upstream on coaxial cable. VDSL is capable of supporting applications such as high-definition television, as well as telephone services (voice over IP) and general Internet access, over a single physical connection.

VDSL2 (ITU-T G.993.2) is a second-generation version and an enhancement of VDSL. Approved in February 2006, it is able to provide data rates exceeding 100 Mbit/s simultaneously in both the upstream and downstream directions. However, the maximum data rate is achieved at a range of about 300 meters and performance degrades as distance and loop attenuation increases.

DSL Rings (DSLR) or Bonded DSL Rings is a ring topology that uses DSL technology over existing copper telephone wires to provide data rates of up to 400 Mbit/s.

Fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) is one member of the Fiber-to-the-x (FTTx) family that includes Fiber-to-the-building or basement (FTTB), Fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP), Fiber-to-the-desk (FTTD), Fiber-to-the-curb (FTTC), and Fiber-to-the-node (FTTN). These methods all bring data closer to the end user on optical fibers. The differences between the methods have mostly to do with just how close to the end user the delivery on fiber comes. All of these delivery methods are similar to hybrid fiber-coaxial (HFC) systems used to provide cable Internet access.

The use of optical fiber offers much higher data rates over relatively longer distances. Most high-capacity Internet and cable television backbones already use fiber optic technology, with data switched to other technologies (DSL, cable, POTS) for final delivery to customers.

In 2010, Australia began rolling out its National Broadband Network across the country using fiber-optic cables to 93 percent of Australian homes, schools, and businesses. The project was abandoned by the subsequent LNP government, in favour of a hybrid FTTN design, which turned out to be more expensive and introduced delays. Similar efforts are underway in Italy, Canada, India, and many other countries (see Fiber to the premises by country).

Power-line Internet, also known as Broadband over power lines (BPL), carries Internet data on a conductor that is also used for electric power transmission. Because of the extensive power line infrastructure already in place, this technology can provide people in rural and low population areas access to the Internet with little cost in terms of new transmission equipment, cables, or wires. Data rates are asymmetric and generally range from 256 kbit/s to 2.7 Mbit/s.

Because these systems use parts of the radio spectrum allocated to other over-the-air communication services, interference between the services is a limiting factor in the introduction of power-line Internet systems. The IEEE P1901 standard specifies that all power-line protocols must detect existing usage and avoid interfering with it.

Power-line Internet has developed faster in Europe than in the U.S. due to a historical difference in power system design philosophies. Data signals cannot pass through the step-down transformers used and so a repeater must be installed on each transformer. In the U.S. a transformer serves a small cluster of from one to a few houses. In Europe, it is more common for a somewhat larger transformer to service larger clusters of from 10 to 100 houses. Thus a typical U.S. city requires an order of magnitude more repeaters than in a comparable European city.

Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) and Frame Relay are wide-area networking standards that can be used to provide Internet access directly or as building blocks of other access technologies. For example, many DSL implementations use an ATM layer over the low-level bitstream layer to enable a number of different technologies over the same link. Customer LANs are typically connected to an ATM switch or a Frame Relay node using leased lines at a wide range of data rates.

While still widely used, with the advent of Ethernet over optical fiber, MPLS, VPNs and broadband services such as cable modem and DSL, ATM and Frame Relay no longer play the prominent role they once did.

Wireless broadband is used to provide both fixed and mobile Internet access with the following technologies.

Satellite Internet access provides fixed, portable, and mobile Internet access. Data rates range from 2 kbit/s to 1 Gbit/s downstream and from 2 kbit/s to 10 Mbit/s upstream. In the northern hemisphere, satellite antenna dishes require a clear line of sight to the southern sky, due to the equatorial position of all geostationary satellites. In the southern hemisphere, this situation is reversed, and dishes are pointed north. Service can be adversely affected by moisture, rain, and snow (known as rain fade). The system requires a carefully aimed directional antenna.

Satellites in geostationary Earth orbit (GEO) operate in a fixed position 35,786 km (22,236 miles) above the Earth’s equator. At the speed of light (about 300,000 km/s or 186,000 miles per second), it takes a quarter of a second for a radio signal to travel from the Earth to the satellite and back. When other switching and routing delays are added and the delays are doubled to allow for a full round-trip transmission, the total delay can be 0.75 to 1.25 seconds. This latency is large when compared to other forms of Internet access with typical latencies that range from 0.015 to 0.2 seconds. Long latencies negatively affect some applications that require real-time response, particularly online games, voice over IP, and remote control devices. TCP tuning and TCP acceleration techniques can mitigate some of these problems. GEO satellites do not cover the Earth’s polar regions. HughesNet, Exede, AT&T and Dish Network have GEO systems.

Satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO, below 2000 km or 1243 miles) and medium Earth orbit (MEO, between 2000 and 35,786 km or 1,243 and 22,236 miles) are less common, operate at lower altitudes, and are not fixed in their position above the Earth. Lower altitudes allow lower latencies and make real-time interactive Internet applications more feasible. LEO systems include Globalstar and Iridium. The O3b MEO constellation is a medium Earth orbit system with a latency of 125 ms. COMMStellation™ is a LEO system, scheduled for launch in 2015, that is expected to have a latency of just 7 ms.

Mobile broadband is the marketing term for wireless Internet access delivered through mobile phone towers to computers, mobile phones (called “cell phones” in North America and South Africa, and “hand phones” in Asia), and other digital devices using portable modems. Some mobile services allow more than one device to be connected to the Internet using a single cellular connection using a process called tethering. The modem may be built into laptop computers, tablets, mobile phones, and other devices, added to some devices using PC cards, USB modems, and USB sticks or dongles, or separate wireless modems can be used.

New mobile phone technology and infrastructure is introduced periodically and generally involves a change in the fundamental nature of the service, non-backwards-compatible transmission technology, higher peak data rates, new frequency bands, wider channel frequency bandwidth in Hertz becomes available. These transitions are referred to as generations. The first mobile data services became available during the second generation (2G).

The download (to the user) and upload (to the Internet) data rates given above are peak or maximum rates and end users will typically experience lower data rates.

WiMAX was originally developed to deliver fixed wireless service with wireless mobility added in 2005. CDPD, CDMA2000 EV-DO, and MBWA are no longer being actively developed.

In 2011, 90% of the world’s population lived in areas with 2G coverage, while 45% lived in areas with 2G and 3G coverage.

Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX) is a set of interoperable implementations of the IEEE 802.16 family of wireless-network standards certified by the WiMAX Forum. WiMAX enables “the delivery of last mile wireless broadband access as an alternative to cable and DSL”. The original IEEE 802.16 standard, now called “Fixed WiMAX”, was published in 2001 and provided 30 to 40 megabit-per-second data rates. Mobility support was added in 2005. A 2011 update provides data rates up to 1 Gbit/s for fixed stations. WiMax offers a metropolitan area network with a signal radius of about 50 km (30 miles), far surpassing the 30-metre (100-foot) wireless range of a conventional Wi-Fi local area network (LAN). WiMAX signals also penetrate building walls much more effectively than Wi-Fi.

Wireless Internet service providers (WISPs) operate independently of mobile phone operators. WISPs typically employ low-cost IEEE 802.11 Wi-Fi radio systems to link up remote locations over great distances (Long-range Wi-Fi), but may use other higher-power radio communications systems as well.

Traditional 802.11a/b/g/n/ac is an unlicensed omnidirectional service designed to span between 100 and 150 m (300 to 500 ft). By focusing the radio signal using a directional antenna (where allowed by regulations), 802.11 can operate reliably over a distance of many km(miles), although the technology’s line-of-sight requirements hamper connectivity in areas with hilly or heavily foliated terrain. In addition, compared to hard-wired connectivity, there are security risks (unless robust security protocols are enabled); data rates are usually slower (2 to 50 times slower); and the network can be less stable, due to interference from other wireless devices and networks, weather and line-of-sight problems.

With the increasing popularity of unrelated consumer devices operating on the same 2.4 GHz band, many providers have migrated to the [[List of WLAN channels#5 GHz (802�a/h/j/n/ac)|5GHz ISM band]]. If the service provider holds the necessary spectrum license, it could also reconfigure various brands of off the shelf Wi-Fi hardware to operate on its own band instead of the crowded unlicensed ones. Using higher frequencies carries various advantages:

Proprietary technologies like Motorola Canopy & Expedience can be used by a WISP to offer wireless access to rural and other markets that are hard to reach using Wi-Fi or WiMAX. There are a number of companies that provide this service.

Local Multipoint Distribution Service (LMDS) is a broadband wireless access technology that uses microwave signals operating between 26 GHz and 29 GHz. Originally designed for digital television transmission (DTV), it is conceived as a fixed wireless, point-to-multipoint technology for utilization in the last mile. Data rates range from 64 kbit/s to 155 Mbit/s. Distance is typically limited to about 1.5 miles (2.4 km), but links of up to 5 miles (8 km) from the base station are possible in some circumstances.

LMDS has been surpassed in both technological and commercial potential by the LTE and WiMAX standards.

In some regions, notably in rural areas, the length of the copper lines makes it difficult for network operators to provide high bandwidth services. An alternative is to combine a fixed access network, typically XDSL, with a wireless network, typically LTE. The Broadband Forum has standardised an architecture for such Hybrid Access Networks.

Deploying multiple adjacent Wi-Fi access points is sometimes used to create city-wide wireless networks. It is usually ordered by the local municipality from commercial WISPs.

Grassroots efforts have also led to wireless community networks widely deployed at numerous countries, both developing and developed ones. Rural wireless-ISP installations are typically not commercial in nature and are instead a patchwork of systems built up by hobbyists mounting antennas on radio masts and towers, agricultural storage silos, very tall trees, or whatever other tall objects are available.

Where radio spectrum regulation is not community-friendly, the channels are crowded or when equipment can not be afforded by local residents, free-space optical communication can also be deployed in a similar manner for point to point transmission in air (rather than in fiber optic cable).

Packet radio connects computers or whole networks operated by radio amateurs with the option to access the Internet. Note that as per the regulatory rules outlined in the HAM license, Internet access and e-mail should be strictly related to the activities of hardware amateurs.

The term, a tongue-in-cheek play on net(work) as in Internet or Ethernet, refers to the wearing of sneakers as the transport mechanism for the data.

For those who do not have access to or can not afford broadband at home, downloading large files and disseminating information is done by transmission through workplace or library networks, taken home and shared with neighbors by sneakernet. The Cuban El Paquete Semanal is an organized example of this.

There are various decentralized, delay tolerant peer to peer applications which aim to fully automate this using any available interface, including both wireless (Bluetooth, Wi-Fi mesh, P2P or hotspots) and physically connected ones (USB storage, ethernet, etc.).

Sneakernets may also be used in tandem with computer network data transfer to increase data security or overall throughput for big data use cases. Innovation continues in the area to this day, for example AWS has recently announced Snowball, and bulk data processing is also done in a similar fashion by many research institutes and government agencies.

Internet access is limited by the relation between pricing and available resources to spend. Regarding the latter, it is estimated that 40% of the world’s population has less than US$20 per year available to spend on information and communications technology (ICT). In Mexico, the poorest 30% of the society counts with an estimated US$35 per year (US$3 per month) and in Brazil, the poorest 22% of the population counts with merely US$9 per year to spend on ICT (US$0.75 per month). From Latin America it is known that the borderline between ICT as a necessity good and ICT as a luxury good is roughly around the “magical number” of US$10 per person per month, or US$120 per year. This is the amount of ICT spending people esteem to be a basic necessity. Current Internet access prices exceed the available resources by large in many countries.

Dial-up users pay the costs for making local or long distance phone calls, usually pay a monthly subscription fee, and may be subject to additional per minute or traffic based charges, and connect time limits by their ISP. Though less common today than in the past, some dial-up access is offered for “free” in return for watching banner ads as part of the dial-up service. NetZero, BlueLight, Juno, Freenet (NZ), and Free-nets are examples of services providing free access. Some Wireless community networks continue the tradition of providing free Internet access.

Fixed broadband Internet access is often sold under an “unlimited” or flat rate pricing model, with price determined by the maximum data rate chosen by the customer, rather than a per minute or traffic based charge. Per minute and traffic based charges and traffic caps are common for mobile broadband Internet access.

Internet services like Facebook, Wikipedia and Google have built special programs to partner with mobile network operators (MNO) to introduce zero-rating the cost for their data volumes as a means to provide their service more broadly into developing markets.

With increased consumer demand for streaming content such as video on demand and peer-to-peer file sharing, demand for bandwidth has increased rapidly and for some ISPs the flat rate pricing model may become unsustainable. However, with fixed costs estimated to represent 80-90% of the cost of providing broadband service, the marginal cost to carry additional traffic is low. Most ISPs do not disclose their costs, but the cost to transmit a gigabyte of data in 2011 was estimated to be about $0.03.

Some ISPs estimate that a small number of their users consume a disproportionate portion of the total bandwidth. In response some ISPs are considering, are experimenting with, or have implemented combinations of traffic based pricing, time of day or “peak” and “off peak” pricing, and bandwidth or traffic caps. Others claim that because the marginal cost of extra bandwidth is very small with 80 to 90 percent of the costs fixed regardless of usage level, that such steps are unnecessary or motivated by concerns other than the cost of delivering bandwidth to the end user.

In Canada, Rogers Hi-Speed Internet and Bell Canada have imposed bandwidth caps. In 2008 Time Warner began experimenting with usage-based pricing in Beaumont, Texas. In 2009 an effort by Time Warner to expand usage-based pricing into the Rochester, New York area met with public resistance, however, and was abandoned.
On August 1, 2012 in Nashville, Tennessee and on October 1, 2012 in Tucson, Arizona Comcast began tests that impose data caps on area residents. In Nashville exceeding the 300 Gbyte cap mandates a temporary purchase of 50 Gbytes of additional data.

Despite its tremendous growth, Internet access is not distributed equally within or between countries. The digital divide refers to “the gap between people with effective access to information and communications technology (ICT), and those with very limited or no access”. The gap between people with Internet access and those without is one of many aspects of the digital divide. Whether someone has access to the Internet can depend greatly on financial status, geographical location as well as government policies. “Low-income, rural, and minority populations have received special scrutiny as the technological “have-nots.”

Government policies play a tremendous role in bringing Internet access to or limiting access for underserved groups, regions, and countries. For example, in Pakistan, which is pursuing an aggressive IT policy aimed at boosting its drive for economic modernization, the number of Internet users grew from 133,900 (0.1% of the population) in 2000 to 31 million (17.6% of the population) in 2011. In North Korea there is relatively little access to the Internet due to the governments’ fear of political instability that might accompany the benefits of access to the global Internet. The U.S. trade embargo is a barrier limiting Internet access in Cuba.

Access to computers is a dominant factor in determining the level of Internet access. In 2011, in developing countries, 25% of households had a computer and 20% had Internet access, while in developed countries the figures were 74% of households had a computer and 71% had Internet access. The majority of people in developing countries do not have Internet access. About 4 billion people do not have Internet access. When buying computers was legalized in Cuba in 2007, the private ownership of computers soared (there were 630,000 computers available on the island in 2008, a 23% increase over 2007).

Internet access has changed the way in which many people think and has become an integral part of people’s economic, political, and social lives. The United Nations has recognized that providing Internet access to more people in the world will allow them to take advantage of the “political, social, economic, educational, and career opportunities” available over the Internet. Several of the 67 principles adopted at the World Summit on the Information Society convened by the United Nations in Geneva in 2003, directly address the digital divide. To promote economic development and a reduction of the digital divide, national broadband plans have been and are being developed to increase the availability of affordable high-speed Internet access throughout the world.

Access to the Internet grew from an estimated 10 million people in 1993, to almost 40 million in 1995, to 670 million in 2002, and to 2.7 billion in 2013. With market saturation, growth in the number of Internet users is slowing in industrialized countries, but continues in Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Middle East.

There were roughly 0.6 billion fixed broadband subscribers and almost 1.2 billion mobile broadband subscribers in 2011. In developed countries people frequently use both fixed and mobile broadband networks. In developing countries mobile broadband is often the only access method available.

Traditionally the divide has been measured in terms of the existing numbers of subscriptions and digital devices (“have and have-not of subscriptions”). Recent studies have measured the digital divide not in terms of technological devices, but in terms of the existing bandwidth per individual (in kbit/s per capita). As shown in the Figure on the side, the digital divide in kbit/s is not monotonically decreasing, but re-opens up with each new innovation. For example, “the massive diffusion of narrow-band Internet and mobile phones during the late 1990s” increased digital inequality, as well as “the initial introduction of broadband DSL and cable modems during 2003-2004 increased levels of inequality”. This is because a new kind of connectivity is never introduced instantaneously and uniformly to society as a whole at once, but diffuses slowly through social networks. As shown by the Figure, during the mid-2000s, communication capacity was more unequally distributed than during the late 1980s, when only fixed-line phones existed. The most recent increase in digital equality stems from the massive diffusion of the latest digital innovations (i.e. fixed and mobile broadband infrastructures, e.g. 3G and fiber optics FTTH). As shown in the Figure, Internet access in terms of bandwidth is more unequally distributed in 2014 as it was in the mid-1990s.

One of the great challenges for Internet access in general and for broadband access in particular is to provide service to potential customers in areas of low population density, such as to farmers, ranchers, and small towns. In cities where the population density is high, it is easier for a service provider to recover equipment costs, but each rural customer may require expensive equipment to get connected. While 66% of Americans had an Internet connection in 2010, that figure was only 50% in rural areas, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project.
Virgin Media advertised over 100 towns across the United Kingdom “from Cwmbran to Clydebank” that have access to their 100 Mbit/s service.

Wireless Internet service providers (WISPs) are rapidly becoming a popular broadband option for rural areas. The technology’s line-of-sight requirements may hamper connectivity in some areas with hilly and heavily foliated terrain. However, the Tegola project, a successful pilot in remote Scotland, demonstrates that wireless can be a viable option.

The Broadband for Rural Nova Scotia initiative is the first program in North America to guarantee access to “100% of civic addresses” in a region. It is based on Motorola Canopy technology. As of November 2011, under 1000 households have reported access problems. Deployment of a new cell network by one Canopy provider (Eastlink) was expected to provide the alternative of 3G/4G service, possibly at a special unmetered rate, for areas harder to serve by Canopy.

In New Zealand, a fund has been formed by the government to improve rural broadband, and mobile phone coverage. Current proposals include: (a) extending fibre coverage and upgrading copper to support VDSL, (b) focussing on improving the coverage of cellphone technology, or (c) regional wireless.

Several countries have started to Hybrid Access Networks to provide faster Internet services in rural areas by enabling network operators to efficiently combine their XDSL and LTE networks.

The actions, statements, opinions, and recommendations outlined below have led to the suggestion that Internet access itself is or should become a civil or perhaps a human right.

Several countries have adopted laws requiring the state to work to ensure that Internet access is broadly available or preventing the state from unreasonably restricting an individual’s access to information and the Internet:

In December 2003, the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) was convened under the auspice of the United Nations. After lengthy negotiations between governments, businesses and civil society representatives the WSIS Declaration of Principles was adopted reaffirming the importance of the Information Society to maintaining and strengthening human rights:

The WSIS Declaration of Principles makes specific reference to the importance of the right to freedom of expression in the “Information Society” in stating:

A poll of 27,973 adults in 26 countries, including 14,306 Internet users, conducted for the BBC World Service between 30 November 2009 and 7 February 2010 found that almost four in five Internet users and non-users around the world felt that access to the Internet was a fundamental right. 50% strongly agreed, 29% somewhat agreed, 9% somewhat disagreed, 6% strongly disagreed, and 6% gave no opinion.

The 88 recommendations made by the Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression in a May 2011 report to the Human Rights Council of the United Nations General Assembly include several that bear on the question of the right to Internet access:

Network neutrality (also net neutrality, Internet neutrality, or net equality) is the principle that Internet service providers and governments should treat all data on the Internet equally, not discriminating or charging differentially by user, content, site, platform, application, type of attached equipment, or mode of communication. Advocates of net neutrality have raised concerns about the ability of broadband providers to use their last mile infrastructure to block Internet applications and content (e.g. websites, services, and protocols), and even to block out competitors. Opponents claim net neutrality regulations would deter investment into improving broadband infrastructure and try to fix something that isn’t broken. In April 2017, a recent attempt to compromise net neutrality in the United States is being considered by the newly appointed FCC chairman, Ajit Varadaraj Pai. The vote on whether or not to abolish net neutrality was passed on December 14, 2017, and ended in a 3-2 split in favor of abolishing net neutrality.

Natural disasters disrupt internet access in profound ways. This is important—not only for telecommunication companies who own the networks and the businesses who use them, but for emergency crew and displaced citizens as well. The situation is worsened when hospitals or other buildings necessary to disaster response lose their connection. Knowledge gained from studying past internet disruptions by natural disasters could be put to use in planning or recovery. Additionally, because of both natural and man-made disasters, studies in network resiliency are now being conducted to prevent large-scale outages.

One way natural disasters impact internet connection is by damaging end sub-networks (subnets), making them unreachable. A study on local networks after Hurricane Katrina found that 26% of subnets within the storm coverage were unreachable. At Hurricane Katrina’s peak intensity, almost 35% of networks in Mississippi were without power, while around 14% of Louisiana’s networks were disrupted. Of those unreachable subnets, 73% were disrupted for four weeks or longer and 57% were at “network edges where important emergency organizations such as hospitals and government agencies are mostly located”. Extensive infrastructure damage and inaccessible areas were two explanations for the long delay in returning service. The company Cisco has revealed a Network Emergency Response Vehicle (NERV), a truck that makes portable communications possible for emergency responders despite traditional networks being disrupted.

A second way natural disasters destroy internet connectivity is by severing submarine cables—fiber-optic cables placed on the ocean floor that provide international internet connection. A sequence of undersea earthquakes cut six out of seven international cables connected to Taiwan and caused a tsunami that wiped out one of its cable and landing stations. The impact slowed or disabled internet connection for five days within the Asia-Pacific region as well as between the region and the United States and Europe.

With the rise in popularity of cloud computing, concern has grown over access to cloud-hosted data in the event of a natural disaster. Amazon Web Services (AWS) has been in the news for major network outages in April 2011 and June 2012. AWS, like other major cloud hosting companies, prepares for typical outages and large-scale natural disasters with backup power as well as backup data centers in other locations. AWS divides the globe into five regions and then splits each region into availability zones. A data center in one availability zone should be backed up by a data center in a different availability zone. Theoretically, a natural disaster would not affect more than one availability zone. This theory plays out as long as human error is not added to the mix. The June 2012 major storm only disabled the primary data center, but human error disabled the secondary and tertiary backups, affecting companies such as Netflix, Pinterest, Reddit, and Instagram.