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US, Asia, Europe Ceding Web Dominance
An anonymous reader writes "A new study shows that presence of the US, Asia, and Western European countries on the web is strongly declining. Newly internet-empowered countries are booming; many geographical regions are showing exponential growth, including Eastern Europe and South America. Chris Harrison explains: 'Countries that have never been able to place a website in the top 500 are now pushing dozens of established websites out of this prestigious list. This trend is both recent (within the last two years) and accelerating. Interestingly, Asia is seeing it's presence eroded the fastest, especially China.'"
Googling for "site:za" brings up 16 million hits, so there's some activity there, but compare that to 7 billion pages in the .com domain. That's obviously not an entirely fair comparison, since .com is used globally, but it gives some idea.
Companies like Amazon have development offices in South Africa, to exploit cheap talent. But in general, although South Africa is industrialized, the proportion of the population wealthy enough to have Internet access is pretty small. Here's an article, Internet Access in South Africa, 2002, which suggests 3.1 million users at the end of 2002, and that number wasn't growing fast. Costs for Internet access are still relatively high.
This is really pointless. From TFA:
"Despite the Internet being a global network, the US has traditionally dominated."
Then later:
"The Internet is still dominated by the United States,"
In other words... Nothing has changed. Figures indicate Eastern Europe is now up to 1%, compared to the US, and South America is nearing 2%.
Good to see it happening, but this is statistical static, worthy of a one-sentence mention in the on-screen ticker of whatever stock/business news program you watch... A complete non-story.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
The infrastructure is good here, but there is a monopoly carrier, Telkom. Bandwidth is so exorbitant overseas hosting is common. Unfortunately this is not likely to change soon. see http://www.hellcom.co.za/ for a Telkom hate site, or google "incompetent idiot", the first result is the one you want.
Any word on what's up with Africa and internet usage, let alone the most popular domains?
Based on the contracts I've been validating over the last six months (w/the Chinese govt. making loans to help them buy such things...from Chinese suppliers, of course), Africa is just now getting the hardware to support a telecom infrastructure. I'd give it at least another 24 months before it could even think about penetrating any part of CH's listings.
A better comparison for your "site:za" (South Africa) might be "site:ca" (Canada).
.za web presence 16 million .ca web presence 107 million
South Africa, population 47 million
Canada, population 32 million
South Africa
Canada
That's quite the divide, isn't it?