The Economist's website would, for example, then be found at www.economist.com.earth.sol.

ECONOMIST: An interplanetary Internet: The wire of the worlds | The

People prefer to address computers by names, such as www.economist.com, rather than numbers (in this case 207.87.8.50, when translated into decimal digits).

ECONOMIST: Internet protocol

Worst of all, the DNS (Domain Name Server) computers used by your ISP can be overwhelmed as they try to translate the names of all the websites subscribers want to visit (say, www.economist.com) into their actual internet addresses (216.35.68.215).

ECONOMIST: The faster the internet becomes, the slower it loads pages