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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.'"
I noticed in Chris Harrison's website a lot of talk of "the rest of the world enters front and center stage" but while he discussed North America, Europe, Asia and South America, he didn't mention Africa at all. Any word on what's up with Africa and internet usage, let alone the most popular domains? I know little about this subject, but am curious now.
Developing world developing.
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.
Indeed.
I'm looking at buying a home with my soon-to-be wife. The only houses that are even close to being affordable in the region are those that have serious structural problems and need a decent amount of work. Even with an FHA loan, we're going to have a hard time making payments along with our student loans.
I recently read that in the 20s and 30s home loans usually had a 5 year term. Of course, now anything less than a 15-year term is rare with 30 and even 50-year mortgages becoming common. I'll be damned if I'm going to be paying on my house when I'm retired. But then again, at this rate I probably won't be retired when I'm in my mid-70s.
It is no laughing matter that our standard of living is falling and no one seems to give a damn.
It is not really suprising that statistics can be made to say anything that you want. It would be suprising if the web presence of the US / Europe / Asia was in decline. What could cause this momentous change in direction? Is this a new trend that could change the face of the world as we know it???
.com does not imply an American company. So the shift in traffic from generic TLD's to country code TLD's for sites in this mythical "top-500" could be explained by a change in presence. That companies no longer want a generic TLD for a "global presence" and instead want a national image. That would be an interesting explanation of the "data", but no, lets go for a screaming headline to pump up traffic in our slashvertisment.
Err, no. It's just some twat pumping traffic to his site. So lets look at what he's done shall we:
* Traffic is declining to first-world web domains!!!
No, not true. The relative share of domains in the top-500 has decreased. Overall traffic and numbers of domains are still increasing. Ahh, so what is being measured as a "top-500" site? Obviously we can bias this any way we want. Does it explain anywhere on the site how this measurement is performed.... no.
* All URL's are geographically based!!!
No,
* Believe what I've told you!!!
We have bold claims about traffic to a wide range of internet domains. There is no description on the site of how the data is gathered. Is this opt-in traffic reporting? Does this guy happen to own a large amount of internet infrastructure? Is it one of the largest benign bot-nets in existence? Or is it the answer behind door D...
Complete, and utter, bullshit.
Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
I am the author of the linked page and have enjoyed reading your comments. I have made an addendum that addresses a number of your points:
"It should be noted that these trends are only based on the rank of top 500 most visited websites. While providing a good snapshot of web activity, the data does not necessarily scale to the entire web. However, it does provide a reliable measure for sites that are utilized by a broad spectrum of the population, such as search engines or news providers. These, in turn, provide a fairly accurate measure of how connected a country is.
Also, this analysis is only looking at rank movement and not web traffic. This was purposeful. Web dominance is an effect of top sites jostling - these are the big players that can exert the most political and social influence. The pure number of websites is less interesting, as it is more of an effect of the economy (i.e. when money is flowing, people setup websites for personal and small business use). Additionally, indications are that traffic is growing across the board. Thus, the trends noted here are most likely from new countries growing faster than old players."
Basically, it doesn't matter how many websites you have, it's how many important websites you have. If the US, Asia and Western Europe loose their dominance in the top 500, they will have no leg to stand on when trying to wrangle the internet and its politics. You can already see the international community starting to put pressure on the US to open the net. It is clear that pressure is only going to increase as US dominance erodes.
Also, I want to reiterate how fast this is happening. In July 2004, US, Asian, and Western European domains controlled 96% of 500 top websites! By January 2007 (just two and a half years later), that number has dropped to below 80%. And, this trend seems to be accelerating.
Chris Harrison
I found the secret of life! But forgot to write it down...