Delivery time varies, but it's possible to send mail across the globe and get a response in minutes. Newsgroups are organized around specific topics, for example, alt.education.research, alt.education.distance, and misc.education.science . Information files . Government agencies, schools, and universities, commercial firms, interest groups, and private individuals place a variety of information on-line. The files were originally text only, but increasingly contain pictures and sound.
Many universities provide Internet accounts to their faculty and students at little or no cost.
Commercial vendors will provide Internet service for a fee. A world of information awaits potential users, everything from job listings to travel guides to exotic locations to movie reviews to full text versions of many of the classics. As these examples show, the Internet contains a wide variety of information, much of it free. Because of copyright issues, the free material is most likely to be material in the public domain, material for which the copyright has expired, or government documents. Some sites will have both WWW sites and gopher sites.