What is the Internet?

People have asked that for a long time, actually years. And it's hard to answer simply; even Ted Stevens, a trained communicator, had some trouble making it entirely clear. Now, though, thanks to Seth Breidbart (no, I don't know who he is) as quoted by JP Stormcrow in a comment (#44) to a post by that's well worth reading for its own sake if you have any use for Bérubé at all, we have a clear, simple one-sentence definition, shorter than these attributions:

It’s the largest equivalence class in the reflexive transitive symmetric closure of the relationship “can be reached by an IP packet from”.

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