Today's Internet (the Net) is a global net of networks with immense data transmission and storage capacities [1] . We use the Net to watch videos, listen to music, search the Web, exchange text messages, phone calls, and emails, trade goods, services, and financial assets, and manage health, education, civic duties, and bank accounts. Navigational and meteorological systems depend on the Net. The 'Internet of Things' invades homes and industries. 'Big data', supported by the Net, opens new ways for research and surveillance. Social networks, enabled by the Net, increasingly affect economic, social and political developments, not without unwelcome ramifications.
More on how a transmission works
Since the early-1990s, the global Internet traffic more than doubled every year until the early-2000s, continued to grow at an average annual rate of 60% during the following 10 years, and presently is still growing at more than 20% per year. Today, more than half of the world's population use the Net, causing a traffic of about one Zettabyte (1021 bytes) per year, an immense stream of data (equivalent to the content of all books ever written transmitted every 5 seconds) dominated by streaming video and audio distributed by large media and internet companies (see Sheet for details).