Electronic Commerce is the term that describes the use of information technology to communicate and conduct business transactions. This is quite broad in nature and we will consider this a little later in the course. We will begin, though, by considering what the Internet is and how it got to be that way. The Internet has been described as a network of computer networks. The most common network structure is a series of computers controlled by a single computer, called a server .
Networks can consist of groups of a few computers to several thousand.
The figure below shows a stylized computer network. As previously mentioned, the Internet is a series of networked networks. The diagram of the Internet will differ from the above diagram for two reasons. First, there is no central server in our diagram controlling the network. Secondly, unlike the network above, connections among the network members do not run through the server to other computer.