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Your Internet Service Provider (ISP) gave you a device of some type that connects to your in-house cable or something of the like. That device is a cable modem or gateway. That device is, in a way, a low-powered server. It provides access to the Internet to you and your family. In all likelihood, you are either directly connected to that device or using wireless to connect to the Internet. That device is controlling how you access the Internet as well as what lanes of the Internet you use. This of your cable modem as a digital taxi or bus.

There are hundreds of taxi and bus companies out there. They can all get you to the same destination, but they all might use different highways, byways, streets, avenues, and alleyways to get you there. Remember that everything on the Internet is numbers. Every website you visit has an Internet Protocol (IP) address. This address is like a phone number. It is unique to the provider of that website. For instance, FreeRepublic's IP address is 209.157.64.200.

Every time you type freeRepublic.com into your web browser, your computer initiates a process that reaches out to the Internet several times, to several different places, for different pieces of information. The first stop is DNS. Remember, DNS is like a phone book. FreeRepublic.com has a "phone number" of 209.157.64.200, and the DNS servers (there are an enormous number of them worldwide) have FreeRepublic's "phone number" listed the same all around. Once your computer gets the right number to access, it reaches back out directly to that "phone number" to access the server that's providing the website that you visit every day. To you, all of the communication is done using letters and words, but to the Internet and all interconnected computing devices, everything is done by numbers.

Your DNS servers, like phone books, are generally the same across the board. The difference between DNS servers and phone books, however, is that you don't have people looking over your shoulder at the phone book while you look for a phone number. With DNS, all of the "calls" you make can be stored on that DNS server as a text file that can be used to identify all of the websites you've browsed, among other things. So while many people choose not to search from Google.com, if you are using one of Google's DNS servers, you're still using Google to access the Internet.

A quick way to determine what DNS servers your computer is configured to use is to check your network adapter configuration. If you're on Windows, you can click 'Start' and open a command window ('cmd'). You can then type 'ipconfig /all' and you will see a list of information about your network adapter(s). In that list, you should see a line that says "DNS Servers," and in all likelihood you're using your ISP's DNS servers. For most people, this works just fine. For the nerds among us, we want control down to the last bit we send out from our machines. If any of your DNS servers have an IP address of 8.8.8.8 or 8.8.4.4, however, you're using Google's DNS.

So that's a small primer on your computer's conversations with the Internet. I apologize if this was overly complicated. I've been working in IT for 20 years, and I often forget that people don't recognize the intricacies of the Internet outside of whether or not it's working.