A less taught aspect of engineering

"Many people think engineering is applied science. It works the same in Perth, Pune, Paris or Pocheon: you will get the same results from the same experiments.

However, engineering is much more than applied science. Engineering is a coordinated social performance of many people with the technical expertise distributed among them, like an orchestra. Social interactions constrain the results just as the strength of steel limits the height of our tallest buildings."

This is such a beautiful and articulate expression of a rarely taught fact about engineering. It's a fact that all engineers would have experienced but not all would have understood. Not until they saw it in plain words as quoted here from this article. I now realize that it was there at the back of my mind, as a funny feeling you get when you use a theorem that you don't fully understand, or when you read a proof that doesn't seem to add up. The article itself may or may not go well with you but this one excerpt, I thought, was worth preserving.

Define "the Internet"

This is a question. I don't know the answer to it myself so I ask you.

I know what the internet protocol is - it's as defined in RFC791. I, therefore, also know what an internet(work) is. I understand what we mean by the Internet, but I am unable to define it, with all my knowledge of networking and network protocols as a graduate student. As a consequence, I am also unable to define the World Wide Web, the definition of which depends on that of the Internet.

The best definition I can come up with is this:

"Internet is that inter-network which has the most nodes (hosts + gateways/routers) in the world that run the internet protocol (RFC791) to inter-connect."

Please contribute if you can provide a better definition.