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.'"

Comments

Africa?

[bhouston]

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.

Re:Africa?

[imemyself]

That might be the case in central Africa, but I would think that it might be a little different in more industrialized nations like Egypt and South Africa. I've heard of bloggers in Egypt several times (one that got arrested IIRC), so I'm assuming that the Internet is atleast somewhat common there.

Re:Africa?

[Anonymous Coward]

I am an African prince. If you help get my website out of this country onto the top 500 list I will share millions of US dollars with you.

Re:Africa?

[alienmole]

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.

Re:Africa?

[djupedal]

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.

Re:Africa?

[Telvin_3d]

A better comparison for your "site:za" (South Africa) might be "site:ca" (Canada).

South Africa, population 47 million
Canada, population 32 million

South Africa .za web presence 16 million
Canada .ca web presence 107 million

That's quite the divide, isn't it?

In other news!

[Anonymous Coward]

Developing world developing.

Whole lotta nothin'...

[evilviper]

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.

South Africa

[mac1235]

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.

Re:Not really surprising

[smallfries]

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???

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, .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.

      * 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.