Many people usually use the terms internet and World Wide Web interchangeably. The internet and the Web are two related but separate things.
The internet and the World Wide Web (the web), though used interchangeably, are not synonymous. Internet is the hardware part - it is a collection of computer networks connected through either copper wires, fiber optic cables or wireless connections whereas, the World Wide Web can be termed as the software part – it is a collection of web pages connected through hyperlinks and URLs. In short, the World Wide Web is one of the services provided by the internet. Other services over the internet include e-mail, chat and file transfer services. All of these services can be provided to consumers for use by businesses or government or by individuals creating their own networks or platforms.
Another method to differentiate between both is using the Protocol Suite – a collection of laws and regulations that govern the internet. While internet is governed by the Internet Protocol – specifically dealing with data as whole and their transmission in packets, the World Wide Web is governed by the Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) that deals with the linking of files, documents and other resources of the World Wide Web.
The Internet
The internet is a massive network of networks, a networking infrastructure. It connects millions of computers together globally, forming a network in which any computer can communicate with any other computer as long as they are both connected to the internet. The network consists of private, public, academic, business, and government networks, of local to global scope, that are linked by a broad array of electronic, wireless and optical networking technologies. Information that travels over the internet does so via a variety of languages known as protocols.
No single person owns the internet. No single government has authority over its operations. Some technical rules and hardware/software standards enforce how people plug into the internet, but for the most part, the internet is a free and open broadcast medium of hardware networking.
The Web (World Wide Web)
The World Wide Web, or simply Web, is a way of accessing information over the medium of the internet. It is an information-sharing model that is built on top of the internet. The Web uses the HTTP protocol, only one of the languages spoken over the internet, to transmit data. Web services, which use HTTP to allow applications to communicate in order to exchange business logic, use the the Web to share information. The Web also utilizes browsers, such as Internet Explorer or Firefox, to access Web documents called Web pages that are linked to each other via hyperlinks. Web documents also contain graphics, sounds, text and video.
Born in 1989 from a proposal written by Tim Berners-Lee, the web allows its users to "jump" (hyperlink) to any other public web page. There are over 40 billion public web pages on the Web today.
The Web is just one of the ways that information can be disseminated over the internet. The internet, not the Web, is also used for email, which relies on SMTP, Usenet news groups, instant messaging and FTP. So the Web is just a portion of the internet, albeit a large portion, but the two terms are not synonymous and should not be confused.
The internet and the World Wide Web have a whole-to-part relationship. The internet is the large container, and the Web is a part within the container. It is common in daily conversation to abbreviate them as the "Net" and the "Web", and then swap the words interchangeably. But to be technically precise, the Net is the restaurant, and the Web is the dish on the menu.