The Internet was designed to evolve in a distributed fashion. Individual machines which were connected to the Internet were given the power to decide who people should talk to for a service in which they are interested. In the entire design of the network layer, there were no gatekeepers except for very basic functionality such as allocation of Internet Protocol addresses and root servers for resolving top-level domains like .com, .org, and .net. Anyone could connect to the Internet and start providing or consuming a service.
As a result, the Internet saw rapid growth in the 1990s and 2000s. Many services such as emails, websites, and chats came up and became an important part of the Internet ecosystem. They enabled the sharing of information and e-commerce. To access a website, all we needed was a web browser. The standardisation of protocols and languages made this easy. In the beginning, Yahoo provided a directory of websites under various categories. As the number of websites exploded, a search engine, Google, came up to quickly provide a list of web pages that matched our search queries.
