The Nizhny Novgorod Internet is a story unto itself — with its own beginning, its own heroes, and its own platforms. This section covers portals and forums, online services and personalities, professional jargon and cultural phenomena of the online environment: everything connected with the development of the internet in Nizhny Novgorod and the Region. It brings together both active resources and long-vanished projects reconstructed from web archives and regional rankings.

The starting point is the pre-internet era: Fidonet — an international non-commercial network with a Nizhny Novgorod node — preceded the mass internet and shaped the first generation of local online users. When the fully fledged web arrived in the late 1990s, the Nizhny Novgorod segment took shape rapidly: internet service providers, city portals, themed websites, and forums appeared in quick succession. A distinctive phenomenon was the Nizhny Novgorod Internet — a local ring in which websites hosted by local providers were accessible at lower cost than the "wider" internet, a feature that shaped the region's traffic consumption patterns for many years.

Among the notable platforms was NN.RU, founded in 1999 by Ilya Osipov and Mikhail Iosilevich, which grew from a link directory into one of the most widely read city publications. City Forum of NN.RU remained for many years the primary venue for public discussion of city life. Running alongside it was NNOV — an information and entertainment portal on the Region's geographic domain. Audience measurement for all these resources was handled by Counter.nn.ru — a regional statistics system and consolidated website ranking that operated from 2000 to 2016 and served as the principal tool for assessing the Nizhny Novgorod web over a decade and a half.

The section also documents the people who shaped the local internet's character. Beyond the founders of NN.RU, it profiles Anderson — a cult figure on the city forums whose presence in discussions became a phenomenon in its own right. Online culture is represented by articles on concepts without which no online community can function: Moderator, ban, Anonymous, Bot, Meme. The Nizhny Novgorod Region contributed several memes of its own to the Russian internet, some of which have dedicated articles — among them BINKH.

A separate layer consists of events and rituals of the Nizhny Novgorod online community. Day of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet became an annual offline gathering of city forum users, held on occasion within the walls of the Kremlin. The Nizhny Novgorod Internet Reboot — a tongue-in-cheek holiday observed on 13 March with a "community clean-up" to delete content — reflects the online community's capacity for self-mockery. Among the themed services of its time, Fotogorky stands out: a fine-art photography community that brought together photographers and models from across the city.

A substantial portion of the section consists of articles about specific websites — from major portals to small corporate pages, shops, clubs, and personal projects. Many no longer exist, but have survived in web archives, and their histories have been reconstructed from archived snapshots and regional ranking data. Together, these materials form a kind of chronicle of the Nizhny Novgorod web: how design evolved, what services were offered online in the early 2000s, what the first online shops and city directories looked like. The section intersects with topics in Mass Media, business, urban culture, and technology — the relevant sub-sections and neighboring parts of the encyclopedia allow these connections to be traced further.