The Internet, in its various manifestations, is rapidly becoming both a major means of communication and an indispensable information tool for those who know how to use it. In the 1990s, with the advent of the Internet's rapidly expanding user-friendly interface, the World Wide Web, knowing how to use it has spread far beyond computer experts skilled in a range of arcane techniques, to virtually anyone with a subscription to a service provider and a PC (or any other computer type) fitted with a modem linked to a telephone line. Across the world, government departments, international and national institutions, universities, banks, companies and individuals are either already 'on the Net' or hurrying to get on. The already substantial opportunities both to acquire and to communicate food science and technology information may be expected to proliferate and expand as fast as the Internet itself.