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In little more than a decade, following commercialization, the Internet has
become a critical and integral part of economic and social life. This has been
made possible by the phenomenally successful growth of the Internet, as a
network of networks. In 2005 more than 20 000 networks with independent
routing policies provided connectivity for themselves and many millions of
their customers. networks, supporting close to a billion users around the
world.
The rapid growth of the Internet into the organizations, cultures, and
societies of industrialized nations may widen the multidimensional gap
separating them from developing nations, exacerbating an already significant
moral and practical problem. A more optimistic hypothesis is that the
Internet's flexible, low-cost communication may lead to improved economic
productivity, education, health care, entertainment, awareness of the world,
and quality of life in developing nations and pockets of poverty within
nations, thus reducing disparity. It is arguable that the low cost of the
Internet and its ability to transport a variety of data types will lead to its
subsuming other media. The Internet is also a decentralized, two-way
medium, therefore, conducive to freedom, which, as Nobel-Prize-winning
economist Amartya Sen points out, is both a facilitator and constituent of
development. Ongoing tracking of Internet diffusion will allow policy makers
to plan and scholars to begin testing these hypotheses.
Measuring the use of Internet identifiers :

Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) manage, distribute, and register public
Internet Number Resources within their respective regions. The Internet
Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) delegates Internet
resources to the RIRs, which then allocate the resources within their regions.
There are currently five RIRs: AfriNIC, APNIC, ARIN, LACNIC and RIPE NCC.
Internet Number Resources (IP addresses and AS Numbers) are distributed
in a hierarchical way. ICANN, in performance of the IANA (Internet Assigned
Names Authority ) functions contract, allocates blocks of IP address space to
RIRs. RIRs allocate IP address space and Autonomous System Numbers to
Local Internet Registries (LIRs), such as ISPs or enterprises, that assign
these resources to the end users.
Statistics on the distribution of Internet resources are available from each

RIR. In addition, in 2003, the RIRs created the Number Resource
Organization (NRO). The purpose of the NRO is to undertake joint activities
of the RIRs, including joint technical projects, liaison activities and policy co-
ordination. The NRO also publishes data on the allocation of IP addresses
(IPv4 and IPv6) and Autonomous System Numbers collected from the RIRs.
Measuring Internet
While it is important to learn more about measuring the Internet, the
available data present a variety of challenges, such as very specific
assumptions and studies with limited time frames. In general, at this point in
time, it must be recognized that researchers are still in the early stages of
understanding how best to interpret the data. There is no central repository
for the measurement of global Internet traffic exchange on or between
networks. Even the view of the Internet routing table is dependent on the
particular Autonomous System that is being used. Many networks do, of
course, measure traffic between themselves and other networks or .on-net
traffic.. On-net traffic is made up of packets exchanged between a network.s
own users or between the operator itself and its customers. The latter may
represent a significant proportion of the traffic where an ISP is also a content
provider. On the other hand, not all IP networks measure Internet traffic to
the same degree as the PSTN. This is largely because the commercial
arrangements can be such that they do not have the same need, even where
such measurement is technically possible.
Service providers need to measure traffic in order to properly design and

optimize their network, including peering and transit arrangements. The
widespread use of Service Level Agreements by ISPs operating networks
require that detailed traffic measurements be made. Mostly such
arrangements are proprietary or non-standard methods of data collection.
Internet trends and Measuring Metrics :

It is common knowledge that the Internet is growing rapidly, perhaps at an
unprecedented rate. Some of the measuring metrics in common use are :
connectivity, number of hosts, number of Web sites, languages used, number
of users, and compound indices. We will discuss it in details considering the
values of these indicators, trends, and disparities among and within nations.
Connectivity
In tracking the diffusion of the Internet, one must choose a balance between
breadth and depth. One of the first to track global Internet diffusion was
Larry Landweber of the University of Wisconsin, who simply noted whether or
not a nation had an international IP link. Landweber produced well-known
maps between 1991 and 1997, graphically showing the Net's progress .
Keeping track of only one easily defined variable allowed him to maintain a
global perspective at a reasonable cost, but this system was limited by the
fact that differences among and within nations were hidden.
Host counts
Another commonly cited measure of the growth of the Internet is the number
of hosts, computers with domain names. Network Wizards (NW) has reported
the number of Internet hosts since 1981 (though they have twice adjusted
the counting method for reasons discussed below). As in figure 1, the
number of hosts continues to grow rapidly, and that growth has accelerated
somewhat during the latest measurement period.
Source: Network Wizards
Over 70 percent of the hosts NW identified are in generic top-level domains

(39,414,465 of 56,218,330). The majority, but far from all, of these are in
the United States. If we focus on the national top-level domains, we see that
the top six nations account for over half of the remaining hosts. The Internet
Software Consortium (ISC), www.isc.org, makes these data more meaningful
by adjusting them for the location of the organization registering the host.
Figure 2 shows these adjusted counts on a per capita basis for the
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) nations .
Number of Web sites
The growth of the Internet accelerated with the invention of HTTP, the World
Wide Web hypertext transfer protocol, and the number of Web sites is an
important indicator. This growth is shown in figure 2, compiled by Netcraft,
[1] www.netcraft.com. The Online Computer Library Corporation (OCLC), [2]
www.oclc.org, estimated the number of Web sites as 4,882,000 in June
1999.They also estimated there were nearly 300 million pages and over 500
million files on the Web. The discrepancies between the OCLC and Netcraft
estimates are due to differences in their methodologies and definitions.
Figure : Groth of Web Servers, Source: Netcrafte

Language distribution
The OECD has studied the distribution of languages used on the Web pages
they harvest and found a predominance of English, and the imbalance is
even more pronounced when focusing on commerce-oriented secure servers.
It was found that 85 percent of the sites were in English-speaking countries.
Language homogeneity has pros and cons. It increases international
understanding and productivity at the cost of loss of conceptual richness. The
dominance of English on the Internet today is decreasing. Paradoxically, if
English turns out to be a universal second language, native English speakers
will find themselves cognitive second-class citizens with less language
diversity than native speakers of other languages.
Number of users
The numbers of Internet users in a nation is another common indicator. NUA,
Ltd.,(http://www.nua.ie/), estimates the number of users in each nation by compiling
and averaging journalistic and market research reports from around the world. Their
current estimate is 201 million users worldwide, as shown in Table 3.
WORLD INTERNET USAGE AND POPULATION STATISTICS
% Usage
Population Internet Usage
Population Population Growth
World Regions % of Usage, % of
( 2006 Est.) ( Penetratio 2000-
World Latest Data World
n) 2006
Africa 915,210,928 14.1 % 32,765,700 3.6 % 3.0 % 625.8 %
Asia 3,667,774,066 56.4 % 394,872,213 10.8 % 36.4 % 245.5 %
Europe 807,289,020 12.4 % 308,712,903 38.2 % 28.4 % 193.7 %
Middle East 190,084,161 2.9 % 19,028,400 10.0 % 1.8 % 479.3 %
North America 331,473,276 5.1 % 229,138,706 69.1 % 21.1 % 112.0 %
Latin
553,908,632 8.5 % 83,368,209 15.1 % 7.7 % 361.4 %
America/Caribbean
Oceania / Australia 33,956,977 0.5 % 18,364,772 54.1 % 1.7 % 141.0 %
WORLD TOTAL 6,499,697,060 100.0 % 1,086,250,903 16.7 % 100.0 % 200.9 %
Figure 3 : World Internet Usage and Population Statistics ( source
http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm )
There are disparities within nations as well as among nations. For example, a
recent U.S. Commerce Department survey shows that the proportion of
Internet users in the United States varies depending upon race, income level,
education level, residential classification (urban, rural, central city), and
state. Note that these data reflect household connectivity, and, if one were to
consider connectivity at the workplace, the differences might be even greater
since the same groups tend to be underrepresented among knowledge
workers. On the other hand, Internet access is often available outside the
home in the United States, at public libraries, schools, Internet cafés, etc.
This is generally not the case in developing nations.

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In little more than a decade, following commercialization, the Internet has

Measuring the use of Internet identifiers :

Statistics on the distribution of Internet resources are available from each

Service providers need to measure traffic in order to properly design and

Internet trends and Measuring Metrics :

Over 70 percent of the hosts NW identified are in generic top-level domains

Figure : Groth of Web Servers, Source: Netcrafte

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