Half of the world is still offline.
3.3 billion people are online. That’s a lot, but we need more policies to bring rich and poor online affordably and in meaningful ways. People who only have mobile Web access, can’t as easily do things like write essays, apply for jobs, or other things that can influence economic growth.
Big digital divides persist, especially in the least wealthy countries.
Internet access is skyrocketing in some regions, but poor, rural and marginalized populations are least likely to benefit. Unless policies change fast, only 16% of people in least developed countries will be online by 2020.
58% of people in the world can't afford an Internet connection.
“Affordable” is widely agreed to be less than 5% of GDP per capita for entry level broadband services, but even that is a steep price for the slow and unreliable Internet in many countries. Also, the lowest percentages of women online are in countries where mobile Internet costs the most.
57.8% of the world’s population cannot afford broadband Internet service
39.5% of the world’s population cannot afford Internet on their phone or mobile device
Chinese is the second biggest language on the Internet in terms of users, but only 2% of Web content is in Chinese.
Only some of the top 9 languages for Web content (English, Russian, German, Japanese, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian, Chinese) correlate with the number of users. Most languages on the Web are underrepresented.
Percentage of internet users
Percentage of internet content
52% of all websites are in English, even though only 25% of the global population understands English.
The percentage of content in English decreases only slowly now, but used to be as high as 75% of all webpages in 1998. When people can read, experience and create content in their own language, Internet health improves.
Censorship is alive on the Internet.
Internet freedom is in decline for the sixth consecutive year, according to democracy watchdog Freedom House in the US. Their 2016 report ranks the majority of 65 countries studied as either “not free” or only “partly free”.
I noticed something that makes me rather confused. India: inflation and class gap massive, and yet it’s still approximately $4 USD a month for a top notch cellular connection with unlimited data usage. USA: middle class alive and well in most areas. Approximately $20 USD a month for a generously lousy connection. Want a better connection? You’ll have to buy a hugely expensive phone and than pay approximately $60-$80 USD or more for cellular service of equal quality. Why? I’m not entirely sure, but more US citizens need to take note of this; our telecos are screwing us all over.… Read more »
Chinese is still on the web what about Hindi Still need to go along way to make the digital India.
There is also map bias. The map used in these graphics is the Mercator projection. It greatly distorts the size of land masses the further you get from the equator. For example, Greenland looks to be of equal size to Africa which is acutally 14 times great in area then Greenland. I would sugest using the Gall–Peters projection. Much better representaion of land area.
How does this change the data?
¡Qué bueno! Al menos alguien pone de relieve el _inmenso_ centralismo que atraviesa todo el internet. Me asombran los comentarios aquí abajo, parece que todo el mundo está contento con las páginas que no les dicen ni mu en inglés. Páginas como http://www.telegraaf.nl/, http://news.sohu.com/, o http://www.elespectador.com/. Supongo que les dejan muy felices cuando no incluyen _ni una palabra_ en su idioma (NO ENGLISH, MAN). Pretender que “lo que no entiendo no lo necesito” es de suyo absurdo: si esa fuera la posición general, la ciencia no existiría. Es, palabras más, palabras menos, la misma posición que encuentro en mi país… Read more »
A little precision: Do you recognize Morocco’s abduction of Western Sahara as legitimate? Another maps in this site shows Western Sahara just as a line besides Morocco with no coast at all. Is it Mozilla’s official position? See the small characters in this map: http://www.un.org/Depts/Cartographic/map/dpko/minurso.pdf
You’re wrong !
Western Sahara is Moroccan .
It’s by territorial occupation:
Loved it! Thanks for the hard work, design and time. <3
There’s nothing wrong with algorithms wanting to know someone’s race. Your ” racial stereo type” opinion is influenced by the cultural Marxists new age developers that are replacing “web accessibility” with “inclusion”. You’re not reinventing the wheel or making it any moral with a “cultural objective”. We are all different and that’s the beautiful thing about diversity. Diversified algorithms embrace people’s individuality and react to it based on the particular target audience. For example, a non-white Facebook user whom once lived in the Middle East mentioned on their Facebook that also searches for Beef in Google Maps may be more… Read more »
I love that most of the comments are by people with white-guy names talking like they are g*d d*mn world travelers that understand the intricacies of the English web-content issue. No one is blaming English speakers for anything, and you shouldn’t be blaming non-English countries for this problem either; the whole idea is to recognize the issue because a more diverse Internet benefits everyone.
I am in an Asian country right now, and these people don’t feel like they’re short on internet content at all. They just don’t have hundreds of websites for every thing. Something that this project isn’t taking into account is that there are a lot of websites that are banned/illegal in the east as well. This is just a result of other countries’ cultures as well as the fact that there are only about 3 million people in the US that know Chinese while there are over a billion websites on the internet. Every Chinese speaker in the US would… Read more »
– English
100% of all the programming languages are based on English, and 100% of all the programmers understands English.
– Chinese
There are tons of content are not allowed Search Spider to get it, such as WeiXin and TaoBao.
I am sure, I am a Chinese people.
There is nothing from stopping the Chinese from making websites or translating content. Chinese learn English starting in elementary school. They can read English websites just fine, I’m sure.
The main reason this is important is because so many people claim that the internet provides universal access to all people, when this information displays that this is not the case. Not everyone is one the internet and their cultures are not all represented to benefit them. Therefore, the things that occur on the internet cannot be viewed as representative of the entire globe.
What is is that the Chinese need from western websites, though? They have access to the internet. They can make websites. They just don’t. They aren’t interested in it. It’s like how South Korea has the world’s fastest internet, and the highest percentage of people with access to the internet. Yet, all South Korea uses the internet for is kakao and video games. The only reason we have so many English websites is because we have so many useless websites. Does something like buzzfeed need to add Chinese? Do the countless adult websites on the internet that are illegal in… Read more »
Why is this a problem? Practically every developed country in the world teaches English as a second language. Most of what’s online is garbage anyways, unless you’re deeply concerned that people in Zimbabwe don’t have enough Minecraft let’s plays and reaction videos on Youtube catering to them. There’s probably more articles online complaining about why the internet has too much English in English than there are in any other languages. The whole “52% of the internet is in English and 25% of people know English” is skewed for numerous reasons too. Such as poor literacy rate in developing nations, the… Read more »
“Chinese is the second biggest language on the Internet in terms of users, but only 2% of Web content is in Chinese.”
Might this have something to do with the restrictions that the CCP places on internet use? No, probably not. It’s probably that English supremacy is linguicist.
Consider that the majority of languages of the world have no writing system. Should we say that the state of language is unhealthy?
Gosh what have I missed,
Poor = no surplus money, little food, poor or non existent medical Care…
Generally, Internet costs money, it is not a necessity for survival.
Therefore it is irrelevant in the scope of a poor person’s existence.
Make the Internet cost nothing, and the time cost will still get in the way.
Policy is not killing the spread of the internet to poor areas, economics is.
You have to invest in people and develop some infrastructure for them to work in.
Having a PHD and living in the jungle might not be too great, but put a PHD in a city…
Providing free internet would also enrich and educate the poor to enable them to a better life. I learn all kinds of things from the internet such as gardening and agriculture which would be important to the poor as a means to food and ways to be successful in that endeavor or building knowledge. The poor aren’t educated and being educated doesn’t mean you have to have a degree.
For most poor people living in third world countries, everyday is a battle for survival. They don’t care 2 hoots about internet as long as they can manage 2 get 2 square meals every day. I totally agree with Steve “Policy is not killing the spread of the internet to poor areas, economics is.”
“When people can read, experience and create content in their own language, Internet health improves.”
So what’s stopping them from doing so? Nothing I’m aware of.
The legend for the maps is the wrong colour: http://i.imgur.com/1vF81gL.png
Thanks, we’ll take a look at fixing.