Refers to all the standards that keep the Internet running. The foundation protocol is TCP/IP, which provides the basic communications mechanism as well as ways to copy files (FTP) and send e-mail (SMTP). The Web added the HTTP protocol for downloading Web pages and HTML, XML and XHTML for formatting them. There are many others and many more are expected, as the Internet has become "the" arena for global standards. See TCP/IP, FTP, SMTP, HTTP and HTML.