Seventeen Years Ago, 66% Of Internet Users Were In The U.S., Today It’s 13%
The Internet has truly become a global phenomenon over the past seventeen years:
In 1996, a full 66% of Internet users lived in the U.S. Seventeen years later, the country is only home to 13% of Internet users.
The largest chunk of web surfers now lives in Asia, home to 42% of users in 2012. Europeans also make up a sizeable portion of the global online population, representing 27% of all users.
Here’s the chart:
Very much underrepresented in the last chart, of course, is Africa, which accounts for 1/6th of the world’s population
100% of Internet users were Americans 25 years ago. That something can have gone from being used in a relative handful of laboratories, military bases, and universities to a worldwide necessity in just 25 years is quite amazing.
No wonder the NSA is so happy.
Seventeen years ago, there was more violent crime.
Hmm…
It’s amazing how fast a technology can spread if it provides lots and lots of naked pictures.
@michael reynolds:
And its development is funded by the federal government out of defense spending and neither service providers nor service users are required to pay for the underlying technology.
@Dave Schuler:
If Americans agree to pay us for using the world wide web, we would perhaps consider paying you for using the internet.
@Tran:
That’s sort of the opposite of the point I was making. If the protocols that make up the modern Internet (including HTTP) had been proprietary, I doubt that the Internet would have taken off the way it has. The earlier proprietary attempts had been curiosities or useful only to specialists.