a.k.a. "the internets"
[Please fill in text and pointers to pages that describe what the internet is on this page]. For instance [L1 ] attempts to define Internet (with a capital I).
A important part of what constitutes the Internet is the standards that make possible communication between hardware on the net. These standards are usually published as RFCs (Requests For Comments) and can be found at: http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc.html
http://www.w3.org/ is the home page for the World Wide Web Consortium (aka W3C). (As is well known, WWW is a tiny piece of the internet.) http://www.internet.com/ is a portal covering internet news, etc.
Oh well... RS sometimes has the pungent notion that the internet is composed of two parts: first, the Tcl'ers Wiki here; second, the Rest Of Internet ;-)
TV Usually one would have to agree with what we were taught in university; that actually there in the overall picture are Transfer Control Protocol and Internet Protocol (TCP/IP). And probably one would drag in the 7 Layer OSI networking model.
See also Data structures: from the bit to the Web and OSI Layers Explained