With all the people using acronyms instead of spelling out their (mostly internal) laughter, you'd think that sending information was more expensive than sending a person in a chicken suit to sing an improvised birthday song.

Sending information's expensive, but it isn't super expensive thanks to a little acronym called TCP/IP, which is short for Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol. Try getting your singing chicken to say that five times fast.

TCP/IP might sound like two protocols, and…it is, if you take the big-picture view of the situation, but it's actually a lot more than that if you want to get into the dirty deets.

In the meantime, we'll be focusing on that macro-style view. This dynamic duo does a lot to keep the internet running by using a four-layer structure. If you follow that structure from top to bottom, you'll see the

• application layer.
• transport layer.
• internet layer. 
• network interface layer.

 

Let's start from the top and work our way down, since expanding on each part randomly sounds confusing and weird. The application layer covers all the protocols that work inside of applications, like Hypertext Transfer Protocol (also known as HTTP), which lets web browsers trade information.

The level's namesake, TCP, comes in at the transport layer, actually moving packets to and from a given application (but more on them later). At the internet layer, IP takes packets and ships them between different computers. After that, the only thing left is the hardware layer, which translates

• outgoing packets from binary into electrical pulses that get sent to the rest of the world. 
• incoming packets coming from the rest of the world in electrical pulses back into binary.

And that's it. That's the birds-eye view of TCP/IP.

(Source 1, Source 2, Source 3, Source 4, Source 5, Source 6, Source 7)