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How come there is only one big "internet"? Isn't it possible to have many smaller, local, networks that can sustain themselves without relying on the internet? Can any internet or networking experts explain this to me?
You can, and places do, have Local networks that may or may not connect to the global internet. In fact, you can have one of those at home. If you have a router and multiple devices, you can unplug your internet connection and have an internal net at home. These are often called intranets. At my last job, we had a nationwide intranet of locations not accessible from the outside.
The internet is just a series of numerical addresses. Devices called name servers translate names like google.com into a numerical address like 172.217.1.78. This means you can reach google by typing that number into your browser top line instead of "google.com".
These addresses are unique worldwide - each device connected to the internet must have a unique numerical address, whether in China or the US or anywhere else.
Private networks run behind devices such as firewalls (part of a home router) and Network Address Translators, also part of home routers.
"In the Internet addressing architecture, a private network is a network that uses private IP address space. These addresses are commonly used for home, office, and enterprise local area networks (LANs).
Addresses in the private space are not allocated to any specific organization and anyone may use these addresses without approval from a regional Internet registry. However, IP packets addressed from them cannot be transmitted through the public Internet, and so if such a private network needs to connect to the Internet, it must do so via a network address translator (NAT) gateway, or a proxy server."
Does that make sense?
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