The Internet has become an important part of everyday life. But what conceptions do secondary school students have of the way the Internet functions? How do they explain the phenomena they experience while using email, chat or video streaming? Although the usage and applications of the Internet are part of the UNESCO curriculum and although the underlying concepts definitely belong to the subject of computer science these questions are not yet in the focus of current research of CSE. This paper presents a brief overview of an empirical qualitative study of secondary school students' conceptions of how the Internet works. For this study we interviewed 23 students who were 13 and 14 years old and analyzed the transcripts using qualitative content analysis. The results show differences between the students' conceptions (like the Internet as one big computer) and the scientific view and give us a list of recognizable patterns which might be helpful for teaching, e.g. to imagine YouTube videos as snakes of play dough.