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Just for the record, access to the internet more than doubled from December 2008 to December 2016.

And for the record, Net neutrality was forced upon the public in April 2015. So your point is?

Just for the record, access to the internet more than doubled from December 2008 to December 2016.

I'm an EE, and love technology but the Internet has turned to fucking shit and much of it needs pulling the plug on now, permanently. Good luck and much love.

20 years ago, give or take a season, there was much less available internet content and there were far fewer users. Of the users in the wild, wild west of '98, I'd say it's a fair gambit a much larger portion of the crowd had tech or computer backgrounds.

There is no surviving 20+ years on a fickle internet without some compromise to cover the bills. Sad and not very idealistic, but it's the World the internet has grown into.

Hope you'll reconsider.

There are 7 Billion (roughly) people in the world, and the majority don't have Internet, phones, or power. If you are in doubt, look at the populations of India and China. The majority do not live in cities, but the sticks.

Only 16% lack access to electricity. The majority do have cell phones, that is not subscriptions which is at 7+ billion somewhere. Half the world is online, at least occasionally. Maybe you should update your prejudices?

P.S. It's actually easier to do power and communication than water supply and sewage. Sanitation is still pretty lacking in many parts of the world.

Apparently there must be well over 1 billion people in Asia who either use an old version of Windows or Linux.

Is Microsoft even targeting users outside of the USA and Western Europe?
Considering that we are not engaged in a thermonuclear war, I'm guessing the answer is "NO".

I'm pretty sure the internet (and computers in general) has topped the printing press in that way.

In less than half a century, the Internet has gone from invention to be widely used in every nation on earth with more than a 3rd of the world's population* actively using it. The printing press, while wildly popular and transformative did not have nearly this level of adoption and impact.

You are right in how transformative the printing press was, and a great example of how we can expect the Internet to continue shaping humanity for the future.

*Source:
http://www.internetworldstats....

EU hate the fact that the 'net is effectively owned by the USA

USA owns 10% of it. And this number will not be going up.

yeah yeah but obama gave free cell phones to food stamp recipients. so that doesn't fly. also rich enough to afford a computer or a phone could reflect previous work prior to being sacked and unable to find work.
i know a few hobos and at least one of them also loved video games especially grand theft auto. also the internet boom is global now.
http://www.internetworldstats.com/top20.htm

It doesn't have to be the same penetration to achieve 40-50% total usage, obviously there are fewer Internet users in India as proportion of population than in USA, however these are total numbers that matter here.

World Internet Users and Population Stats - by looking at this data one can sort of see why nearly half of the 'nuisance' comes from BRIC countries.

If you're on /. you're the 1% as far as Africa and Asia are concerned (but then, you liberal shitbags don't actually care about brown people).

Over a third of the world has Internet access. But conservatives rarely let facts affect their opinions.

You blindly assume that everyone online on the net needs a seperate IP address. But that is clearly wrong. The place where I work has only 16 public IP addresses, yet there are about 500 PCs buzzing along with people surfing and mailing.

Considering that we're about 2.3 billion people online and we're already talking about running out, we're using considerably more than 1 IP/person today. And if the entire world eventually reach North American penetration rates there's another 3 billion coming online. And most now believe the world population will peak at 10 billion so there's another 2.3 billion as well. Yes, with enough NAT you could probably make it sort of work but it'd be the end of the Internet as we know it. Only ISPs, big companies and people with way too much money would have a public IP that others could talk to. The rest could only access Facebook and YouTube and such via NAT.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Summary_table
http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm

About 20% of all internet users. That's about 1.3 billion people.

Close enough, really. According to several different sources internet access is had by around 84.5% of the population. Even if the remaining 15.5% are all law-abiding non-downloaders the 80% of the online population (~67.6% of the total population) are still quite a lot more than half the entire country.

Internet is the WWW and vice versa. It's a fact and it's a matter of statistics.
The fact that 0.001% (at best) of mankind knows the difference among DNS, IP, TCP, HTTP and HTML is irrelevant to the whole world.
It's just one thousandth or, according to some source, just 2.6M persons. It's just background noise!
Say it with me thrice: "Internet is the WW" ...

In 2009, there were 32 million DSL modems in the United States. http://www.internetworldstats.com/am/us.htm

Even if there has been no growth in DSL usage, 100,000 modems represents 0.3% of all DSL users.

BUT, this 100,000 number is world wide modems that have been compromised. That makes the actual percentage of modems affected so small that it hardly seems worth the time to calculate it.

Turn the "bad" DNS off, and most tech support lines will not even notice the increase in support calls.

Ok, the country with by far the most internet users is China, you want to give them a 22.5% interest in regulating the internet? Or instead, lets prioritize on a per capita basis, the country with the highest internet usage per capita is Greenland. They're the most vulnerable to regulation, so let's put them in charge. India has only 10% per capita online, but they're #3 for most users. The top G8 country per capita is Canada at #4.

You figure out a way to get big countries with low per capita usage and small countries with high per capita usage to agree on anything, and I bet the Nobel committee would come a-knocking. In the meantime, the country that ranks highest in combined number of users and per capita usage is the US. At least they're predictable. Next on that list are Japan and Germany. Eerie isn't it?

And for the record, I am not American.

If you have 2 systems, then you're doubling the workload of the teachers since now they have to manage notices using 2 systems. I don't know where you go to school, but in many public schools, there are more than just a "few" students who either can't afford home internet, or whose parents are not computer literate.

According to this site, 77% of the US had internet access in 2010. It's hard to say how that translates to school kids, but a significant part of that 23% without access is probably the elderly. A lot of poor parents are illiterate (not nearly 23%, but there are some, especially among non-native speakers), yet we expect them to read the written missives from parents.

I get the argument that transitioning to an electronic based reporting and communication system is difficult with out near 100% uptake on the part of the users (read: parents), but it's something that definitely needs to be done. If the obstruction is lack of access, then we should be devoting resources to ensuring that the poor can get affordable or free access. If we can give free breakfast/lunch to poor kids, we should give them free internet. It would arguably do as much as better nutrition to help their education.

The study is about improving voter access, not going backward.

Computer/internet access is estimated at only 77% in the US. Thats in line with the US Census bureau estimate of 68% back in 2009.

Internet cafe? Really? I have no idea where these things exist any more, and nothing would suppress voter turnout than having to queue up at some sleazy back alley gamer/porn den.

Libraries? With their semi-functional ancient computers? No.

And if you seriously don'b believe this could be gamed and hacked you are nuts.
Nothing like handing the keys of power out as the prize for the first person (country) to do so.

What the IPv6-people just refuse to understand is that there is zero benefit for running IPv6 now.

For you and me and the rest of the already connected world what you say is true, however there is a huge population of consumers that will want to be connected soon that will have no choice but to use IPv6 - we're talking 100s of millons of people over the next decade. Any business that wants to connect with that IPv6-only customer will make sure that their service/product is available via IPv6.

In the beginning of 2011 there was 2 billion internet users on earth, so it's half of that. Granted, the percentage is lower in Russia and China (because they have their own Facebook versions) but it is also higher percentage in western countries.

When quoting about this SK Comm hacking incident, it should be noted that the "35 million users" is quite significant. There are approximately 39 million total internet users in South Korea with 48 million total population. This means nearly 90% of all S. Korean internet users' information was compromised. That, or more than 70% of total population. It's suffice to say the incident practically threw all relevant Korean people's key personal information out in the wild.

Oh, and by key personal information, I'm referring to Resident Registration Numbers that were part of the leaked info. RRN is a unique, non-transferable, non-modifiable serial number given to every Korean citizen, and thus is used as a highly convenient way of identifying the person in question. You can retrieve someone's website registration ID just by knowing the name and RRN, so it's something you yourself are only supposed to know. Since password hashes were also leaked, and since lots of folks reuse same password over and over, it would be relatively easy to pick out someone out of the leaked database and use the information to login to other websites, and by doing so, get even more personal information out.

Now the Korean websites are "encouraged" more than ever to use alternative means to identify someone, but I fear the cat's already out of the bag.

So, 6 out of every 5 of Israelis have computers, eh? That's either an evil Zionist plot, or your numbers are just as $#!% as mine.

(For the record, I acutally did have a source form them, although now I'll cop to accidentally taking the wrong column of data -- although, to be fair, the title suggested the desired data would be the most-prominent. So 70% still have no access to the internet, and as AC below suggests, a lot of the other 30 are likely in places where all they have available is in a cafe.)

Remarkably little open source adoption, which is why I think Ubuntu is pushing so hard. Good IMHO.

Remember our infrastructure and internet culture was about 10-15 years behind the states, but that gap is closing. For a country of such size, we make 5.7% of world internet users (vs 22% EU and 23% USA).

Many companies are stuck with Microsoft systems and similarly commercial software. Working for 8+ years in software development in South Africa, I know two companies who adopted FOSS in the last 12 months.

You may even see articles like this one, with 3 family members who work for the local government, I haven't seen much of that FOSS preaching.

On the other hand, this is a great opportunity here!

Who wants to make a startup with me? ;D

I don't know what you're smoking, but I think the statistics put you to shame

Opera has more than 200 million users (on desktop and mobile combined), so I think they're doing pretty well as it is.

This number is repeated in many posts here. But are those users not using the Internet? Total number of Internet users, on any device, is estimated at around 2.1 billion. With 200 million users Opera should have close to 10% share of users, but statistics only have them at a third of that, around 3%, for desktop and mobile combined.

Two sources for numbers but have also seen other sources with about same numbers: http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm. http://marketshare.hitslink.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=0

Yes it's a lot of people visiting Google. Some may be double counted of course, many more will be missed due to shared Internet connections. If at home my wife and I use the Internet at the same time, we share a single connection, and with that IP address. I wonder whether they count that as one or as two unique visits.

On the other hand, one billion unique visitors to Google isn't that surprising, considering there are currently almost than 2.1 billion Internet users according to this site. How accurate this number is, that's hard for me to judge, though it does sound plausible.

Finding stuff on the Internet means you need help from a search engine. To me there are two core uses of the Internet: one is communication (e-mail, IM, forums), the other is finding information. And for the second one (which includes finding music, videos, etc) one needs help from a search engine. And Google is by far the most popular search engine around, overall. Some countries have local search engines that are more popular, worldwide Google has a market share of something like 80-90% - the sites that give search engine market shares do not exactly agree, except for Google having a near-monopoly on search nowadays.

So to put it all in perspective: it seems that about half the Internet users in this world uses Google at least once every month. A far from shocking number, you may even call it on the low side considering how important search engines are for being able to find information on this vast network.

Looking at the UN's list of countries by CO2 emissions (conveniently sorted on wikipedia), we see that Japan is holding the #5 spot, with 1.25 billion metric tonnes annually and Russia is at #4, with 1.53 billion metric tonnes. Let's assume that "the internet" falls just behind Russia, and has roughly the same amount of pollution as it does.

Now, according to Internet World Stats, there are an estimated 1.9 billion people on the internet. That means that "the Internet" emits less than 0.8 metric tonnes of CO2 per capita annually. For what it's worth, that's not even twice what an average adult human being produces each year just by being alive.

However... checking wikipedia's list of countries by industrial carbon dioxide emissions per capita, we see that 0.8 metric tonnes per capita would put it somewhere between Swaziland, which is #157 on the list, and Paraguay, which #162. (I know that it's wikipedia and you can't count on wikipedia always being accurate, but these numbers are fairly easy to verify by dividing the UN's totals from the previous reference by each country's population. A cursory examination doesn't show any obvious errors, and if the numbers are wrong, I can't see them being out by an amount that would significantly alter my conclusion, below. If somebody else does have verifiable facts and figures that would contradiction my conclusion, please feel free to respond).

So per capita, "the internet" is in the lowest 30%, worldwide... which while it may not be as perfect as some would like it to be, is still pretty damn good. So who wants to break it to Greenpeace that their newly declared "public enemy" is actually one of the world's best in the world at keeping things green?

Internet Penetration: Falkland Islands have 100% Internet Penetration, making Internet freedom 100% relevant to their existance. The US ranks 16th, with 76.3%, which means freedom on the Internet is of less actual significance to them.

So, no, it doesn't weaken my argument. Rather, it weakens yours as you are neglecting to factor in that freedom only matters when people are involved. A country with rather insignificant adoption of the Internet, such as the US, has no serious impact from abridged freedoms. In a country like the Falklands, where EVERYONE is connected and alternative sources are scarce to non-existant, even a miniscule impact on freedom has devastating impact on EVERYONE involved.

Pitcairn are not in the top 56 nations with connectivity and therefore even 100% restriction on the Internet will have 0% impact on Internet freedom. Do try and think logically. I know you're a K5er, but that doesn't mean you have to think in the K-5 age range.

If anything, it's more fitting to be depressed because space travel has advanced far, far less over the last 50 years than just about anything.

But no, the last decade did bring a fair bit of innovation, I think. Just a few things...

On the Internet front, not much technically new, but last decade is when it truly became widespread globally, instead of being largely limited to a few rich Western countries. From 2000 to 2010, Europe went from 105 million to 475 million Net users. Mideast went from 114M to 825M. Africa, where overall use remains very low, still went from 4M to 110M. [Source: http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm%5D

A lot of interesting stuff happened with cybernetic implants / mind controlled tech. The BrainGate allowed paraplegics to mentally control a robotic arm (see Matt Nagle).

Stem cell research has shown some very promising things. Shinya Yamanaka came up with some method to use non-embryonic stem cells by some reprogramming process I won't claim to understand.

Spirit & Opportunity discovered proof of liquid water once on Mars, while frozen water got discovered on the Moon. And the first private spaceflights took place in this decade.

As far as gadgets and such go, some are also rather important. Digital cameras became commonplace, which I'd say is a more important innovation than smartphones, for now at least. In terms of ease and convenience, Wi-Fi and flat LCD screens became popular - with Wi-Fi being widely used and LCDs essentially pushing CRTs off the market, personal computing became easier.

Come to think of it, mobile phones! Last decade is when they went from expensive to common. In 2000, in my area at least, they'd be mostly used by businessmen and those who really had a need, but over a few years mobile phones became so widespread that grannies and schoolchildren have them now, in the last few years they've also caused landline use at home to become less prevalent.

Perelman's proof of the Poincare conjecture gave a solution to one of the most important outstanding problems in mathematics.

A functional memristor was built at HP. This can be a very important technology.

3D printing has become feasible for use.

And to finish this post, Mycoplasma laboratorium. One of the most potentially interesting developments in recent times, while it could also pose major ethical issues and possible misuse.

Interesting decade!

If you can believe http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm and http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats3.htm#asia and http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats4.htm#europe then there are 1.967 billion total internet users in the world, of whom .0597 billion are in Russia, 0.42 billion are in China, and 0.0394 billion in South Korea.

So between the three of them, that's 26.4% of global users. What fraction of global searchers that is will depend on how search frequency varies. That's assuming that we trust the numbers above and "search engine market share" is fraction of number of searches done...

If you can believe http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm and http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats3.htm#asia and http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats4.htm#europe then there are 1.967 billion total internet users in the world, of whom .0597 billion are in Russia, 0.42 billion are in China, and 0.0394 billion in South Korea.

So between the three of them, that's 26.4% of global users. What fraction of global searchers that is will depend on how search frequency varies. That's assuming that we trust the numbers above and "search engine market share" is fraction of number of searches done...

If you can believe http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm and http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats3.htm#asia and http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats4.htm#europe then there are 1.967 billion total internet users in the world, of whom .0597 billion are in Russia, 0.42 billion are in China, and 0.0394 billion in South Korea.

So between the three of them, that's 26.4% of global users. What fraction of global searchers that is will depend on how search frequency varies. That's assuming that we trust the numbers above and "search engine market share" is fraction of number of searches done...

China has more Internet users than any other nation (420 million), so being down at number 18 for spam seems quite good.

Well, to be a bit flippant: it's easy to solve many problems when you can simply send the trouble makers off to "re-education camps" or just shoot them. Having an authoritative form of government makes removing "disharmonious" elements of society much easier.

If they're this effective in removing spam, perhaps they can start working on the hacking attempts into the networks of foreign governments (like Canada's finance ministry just a short while ago).

China has more Internet users than any other nation (420 million), so being down at number 18 for spam seems quite good.

Mobiles? Why not address buffering issues on fixed lines?

Oh wait, I forget the real world has great infrastructure, and not controlled by a telecoms monopoly. :'-(

Great. And what phones do they have? I doubt that among those 80% the iPhone owners are in the majority. 10% of the Indonesians have Internet access. Most of those are located in the major cities. Indonesia's slums have been struggling for decades to fight rampant diseases and starving. It is a very poor country with much of the population receiving at best a mediocre basic education. Aside from those 10% with Internet I doubt that many others own a computer, though I could not find any numbers to substantiate this. Can you provide anything to the contrary to enlighten me?

Latest estimate for total Internet users is around 1.9 billion, so 600 million registered Facebook accounts gives about a 30% chance assuming they are all active.

Of course there may be regional variations.

Internet World Stats

Maybe, but currently China only has 21% of internet users.
Leaving the other ~79% of internet users which are much more likely to be able to read/write English than Chinese.
Not to mention the amount of existing content already in English

And I'm not sure how "The Great Firewall" influences these numbers.

Have you ever heard of a chat room? Or forums? The student-to-teacher ratio on the Internet is one-to-over-9000. You'll probably refuse to believe this, but on the Internet there are tons of people willing to share knowledge on most everything there is to know. And its free.

Before you think, "Wheres the incentive for people to help other people" you must realize that there are almost seven billion people on this planet, and roughly two billion have Internet access*. Everyone has a potential audience of two billion people...
* http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm

27.3% is not "most of the computing world". In fact, it won't even be the most popular language in computing for long.

http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats7.htm

If that were true Opera would have about 7% usage share because there are about two billion Internet users. Opera in fact has 2-3% usage share.

The main thing I don't like about Opera is the hyperbole. It also hurts Opera because when people try Opera and see that the hype was just hype, they're disappointed. Try some humility if you want Opera use to actually double every two years.

Thanks for the numbers. There are about two billion computer users out there on the Internet. (Source: Internet World Stats) So barely one in a hundred computer users have downloaded Flash 10 deliberately. Although one percent is a huge percentage of computer users, it's still almost two orders of magnitude smaller than the installed base....

Even Seattle, with it's suburban neighborhoods of separated houses is going to have trouble matching Tokyo high-rise apartments, where you can get 1Gb networks in some places.

The reason slashdot readers have so much trouble with this (and start making up conspiracy theories like the one in the summary) is because the FCC has a different goal than the average slashdot reader. The average slashdot reader wants an OC192 line straight to his house. The FCC wants to give everyone broadband. So if you have 1mb download speeds, you're basically a success case for the FCC, even if you're not happy about it. The FCC is going to try to reach the people still on dial-up (I don't know who that is).

As you can see from this chart, the US has more broadband users than any other country in the world. It has a higher percentage of broadband users than even Japan. So as far as the FCC is concerned, their goals are being reached. Your personal goal (and frankly, my personal goal) of getting an OC192 line is not a priority to them. Sorry.

Most companies will give you a number of registered users. That sounds better: it's a higher number than active users.

Secondly in case 50% of the accounts is active (which would surprise me; I expect a lower percentage), this would mean 800 mln total accounts. Or on account for every 10 people in this world. Currently the about 1.8 bln which would mean almost half of all Internet users have a Facebook account. Even at 400 mln registered users that means 22% of all Internet users in this world have a Facebook - this is already a very high number.

One billion users? There aren't even 2 billion people with internet access at all.

Oh, I'm well aware indeed. The lifestyle you describe is for us few remaining middle class folks.

Our poor people buy these things. Open your eyes.

262 million cell phones subscribers in the united states.

227 million internet users in the united states

The median income of the united states is enough to afford plenty of shit we dont need.

Dont be a jealous ass. We are rich. The whole "upper class" vs "middle class" vs "lower class" shit is exactly that.. shit. That doesnt tell you how rich you are. How rich you are is irrespective of how much more other people have. If I had a 100 trillion dollars, would that instantly make everyone else poor? This tactic of class separation is tired old shit pulled by politicians that want to sell you a story and get your vote. They prey on your jealousy and you have fallen for it hook, line, and sinker.

http://www.internetworldstats.com/eu/uk.htm

Shouldn't take too long to copy a few databases with a total of 48,755,000 records.

Plug in a random number generator and hook it up to mail merger software.
After all, the RIAA/BSA/what-have-you seem to suspect ALL of us, so let's just cut to the chase and we can all chip in to help these poor bastards pay for their hookers and coke.

The computer, consumer electronic market and the gaming console market are like quick sand; its hard to say who is really winning or losing.

26% of the Planet is online.. but the vast majority of them are connecting with Mobile Devices. The rest are connecting with some type of Intel/AMD based device and some with other processors like ARM but very few of them (I don't have the exact percent) are running an Apple OS.

Thus in that context Apple while is winning in consumer electronics (phone, music play, etc.) versus Microsoft there is real competition and MS had phones for a lot longer. MS is winning over Apple in the gaming console area but has lots of competition from real gaming companies..

http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm

how is it winning if apple isn't even competing in gaming devices?
and no, fucking iphone/pad are not gaming devices. by that logic nokia is/has been the leader in the gaming segment for about 15 years. i still remember space invaders on my 1100.

The computer, consumer electronic market and the gaming console market are like quick sand; its hard to say who is really winning or losing.

26% of the Planet is online.. but the vast majority of them are connecting with Mobile Devices. The rest are connecting with some type of Intel/AMD based device and some with other processors like ARM but very few of them (I don't have the exact percent) are running an Apple OS.

Thus in that context Apple while is winning in consumer electronics (phone, music play, etc.) versus Microsoft there is real competition and MS had phones for a lot longer. MS is winning over Apple in the gaming console area but has lots of competition from real gaming companies..

http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm

apple's position is similar. california may have a bullshit law that goes contrary to majority of the world, and apple may be making use of it.

Bullshit law that goes contrary to the rest of the world? What's the law in the rest of the world? Finders keepers losers weepers?

no. DEFINITION of what stealing is.

that does not justify it in the eyes of rest of the world, ie, the internet community.

The internet community is not the rest of the world, merely a smaller, less well informed, much more vocal, microcosm of the world.

you got that backwards. internet community is the most informed, up to date, active segment of the world. you got vocal right, but you also failed in the percentage of its own cosmos. it isnt micro by any measure. as of recent our total is approx 1,8 billion. even if you boil it down to i.t. cosmos in this internet users subset, it still makes a HUGE population which is bigger than many g5 countries.

http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm