Slashdot Mirror
Almost Half the World Will be Online by End of 2016 (indiatimes.com)
By the end of this year, almost half of the world's population will be using the internet, partly because of growth of mobile networks and internet access becoming affordable to many, a United Nations agency said. From a report:In the world's developed countries about 80 percent of the population use the internet. But only about 40 percent in developing countries and less than 15 percent in less-developed countries are online, according to a report by the U.N.'s International Telecommunications Union (ITU). In several of Africa's poorer and more fragile countries, only one person in 10 is on the internet. The offline population is female, elderly, less educated, poorer and lives in rural areas, said the union, a specialized agency for information and communication technologies. Globally, 47 percent of the world's population is online, still far short of a U.N. target of 60 percent by 2020. Some 3.9 billion people, more than half the world's population, are not. ITU expects 3.5 billion people to have access by the end of this year
More Facebook/Twitter fodder...
Billions of IoT toys waiting to be botted. Millions of poor people who have all day to sit around devising online scams. Hysterical fake news flashes clicking like a Geiger counter in an activated pile. Signal to noise ratio approaches zero.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Half of the world will be botnets
And the other half will be too happy to care that they aren't online.
Does online mean they have to have a device and some sort of access to the internet as 'they' know it? If that's the case, it's probably just the classic case of watering down statistics to manipulate this into this some sort of seemingly still existent 'technical divide' problem in this world.
In regards to the African statistic that was tossed out, 1 in 10 people is on the internet. Throwing out the fact that if 'online' means having/owning your own device and access service, I'd like to think that chances are, they are on occasionally already or are already exposes by the 9 others around them.
Almost half the world will be online by the end of 2016, and they'll all stumble upon /pol/ and /b/, and civilization will go up in flames.
The internet: it had the potential to bring countless Libraries of Alexandria and endless learning to every citizen, putting the sum total of human knowledge at one's fingertips. Instead, it gave us cat videos and memes. The sublime met human nature, and it turned out that humans were far uglier creatures than even Hawthorne imagined.
TSLSIA
There are some problems to solve before. Frankly speaking, while people are busy connecting developing countries to internet, I meet more and more people who are dissatisfied of internet, and have plans to spend less and less for internet access. Maybe it is better to focus on the quality of what it is delivered, rather than how to deliver it.
Even in 2016, half the world's population still offline.
I've had discussions here and elsewhere on whether home Internet access is a necessity or a luxury. I claim that Internet access is a necessity to find and keep a job because so many employers offer email or a web form as their preferred if not only means of application. But others claim that visiting a public library during its normal hours of operation ought to be enough for anyone, even if the nearest library branch is open only 9 AM to 6 PM on some days or not at all on weekends (source: acpl.info), or even if public transportation between your home or work and the nearest library branch is inconvenient or nonexistent.
The incoming Trumpian Administration has sent clear signals of wanting to scuttle all this for a quick and killing profit by ditching all Net Neutrality pretenses out the window. How this supposedly represents "swamp draining" taxes the imagination, specially with the hordes of lobbyists, CEOs-on-leave and other special interest types clogging the list of appointees.