There is a great article in this Sunday's Observer by John Naughton entitled 'The internet: Everything you ever need to know'. It gives 9 points of understanding that really get to the meat of understanding the Internet without getting overly technical. There is also a strong cultural/historic rooting to the piece that gives good context. I do recommend reading the whole article, but I also wish to comment on one point he makes about ecology:

Does clamping down on piracy via the law book stop piracy?  It's seems it might not...it just changes form:

I suspect most people's use of the torrent protocol comes in the form of a separate p2p software client (e.g. Azureus or Transmission), indeed, this is the method I have been looking at for my research.