All humans, ever: ~117.0 billion*
All humans, 2022: 7.9 billion
Internet users, 2022: 5.3 billion
* Population Research Bureau estimate, 2021
Posted three weeks ago, the “Declaration for the Future of the Internet” joins the Biden administration and 60 other governments in an attempt to define the principal challenges to the digital future and set a direction for policies to address them. A few bits of data first:
According to the International Telecommunications Union, 4.9 billion people around the world used the Internet last year. A less official update from WorldInternetStats.com this spring finds 5.3 billion. This is just over two-thirds of the world’s 7.9 billion people, up from 50% at the end of the Obama administration, and about 1% in faraway 2000. Put another way, demographers at the Population Research Bureau calculate the total human population since the origin of the human species about 300,000 years ago at 117 billion. If this is about right, today’s Internet users make up one in 25 of all the men, women, and children who have ever lived. This year they will:
… transfer roughly 100 zettabytes of data around the world via fiber-optic cable and satellite beam. (A zettabyte is 1 sextillion bytes. The European Space Agency believes the universe contains somewhere between 100 sextillion and 1,000 sextillion stars.)
… conduct $26.7 trillion in electronic commerce, by UNCTAD’s 2022 estimate. (The International Monetary Fund believes global GDP this year is $103 trillion.)
… and spend 4.2 trillion hours on social media. (This sums to 479 million years, roughly the time elapsed since the “Cambrian Explosion.” Alternatively, the longest recorded single lifespan, that of Arles resident Jeanne Calment, 1873-1998, was 0.00000000012 trillion years.)
Another way to put these figures in context: at the birth of the Internet somewhere in the 1980s, a statistician might count a few million bytes of data transferred across early computer networks, about $0 in electronic commerce, and a few thousand academics and government officials berating each other on electronic bulletin-boards.
So, quite a remarkable first generation.
After appropriately noting this fact and recognizing the scientific and technical achievement that enabled it, the Declaration for the Future of the Internet focuses on (a) emerging policy challenges for the second generation, and (b) the values and goals that should inform a response to them. Top concerns include: escalating use of digital technologies, in some cases by governments, for disinformation and cybercrime; spread of national firewalling and restriction of information, also by governments; fears among many users of loss of privacy and eroding ability to control personal data, whether to governments, unscrupulous businesses, or criminals; and abuse of online platforms to inflame conflict, undermine respect for human rights, and threaten groups vulnerable to prejudice and hate.
The Declaration offers no specific technical measures or agreements to address these concerns, nor new venues in which governments and/or “multistakeholder” fora should develop them. Instead, it sets out a long-term objective — “an environment that reinforces our democratic systems and promotes active participation of every citizen in democratic processes, secures and protects individuals’ privacy, maintains secure and reliable connectivity, resists efforts to splinter the global Internet, and promotes a free and competitive global economy” — and proposes five general principles to inform the actual policies that might deliver this:
1. “Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms,” including combatting online violence and exploitation, reducing illegal content, and protecting freedom of expression.
2. “A Global Internet,” in which governments are discouraged from restricting access to lawful content, or shutting down access generally or to specific types of information, and encouraged to support free flows of data, cooperate in research and development, and act responsibly themselves.
3. “Inclusive and Affordable Access,” including through closing digital divides, encouraging diverse cultural and multilingual content, and supporting digital literacy and skills for publics.
4. “Trust in the Digital Ecosystem,” involving common responsibilities to combat cybercrime, protect personal data, use trustworthy technologies, avoid attacks on elections, support open trade and fair markets, and minimize digital contributions to climate change emissions.
5. “Multistakeholder governance,” to support technical advance and avoid undermining technical infrastructure.
Via the White House, the Declaration for the Future of the Internet.
A signers list from the State Department: 39 governments in Europe, five in the Pacific, three in Africa, one in the Middle East, and nine in the Western Hemisphere. (Some puzzling non-participants — Korea? Switzerland? Norway?)
And looking back: In the 50-million-internet-user world of 1997, the Clinton administration imagines policies for today’s digital global market.
BEA on the American digital economy in 2020 (with quiet side note to BEA, the dots are three places off to the right on page 4).
UNCTAD on global e-commerce.
The Internet Society’s attempt to document the actual “launch of the Internet” date. Authors settle on the January 1, 1983, transition of U.S.-based academic and government networks to an interoperable TCP/IP protocol:
Geneva-based CERN, on the other hand, looks to Berners-Lee’s 1989 WWW software, and the first web-site launch.
And some fun with 2022 Internet numbers
100 zettabytes – The European Space Agency calculates stars in the heavens.
1 in 25 humans: The Population Research Bureau counts all the people who have ever lived.
4.2 trillion person-hours of social media: Stephen Jay Gould’s Wonderful Life (1989); Gould’s theses on the Cambrian’s possibly wider variety of phyla are not in favor, but still the best ever user-friendly descriptions of Anomalocaris, Opabinia, and the weird world of the first big animals.
Ed Gresser is Vice President and Director for Trade and Global Markets at PPI.
Ed returns to PPI after working for the think tank from 2001-2011. He most recently served as the Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Trade Policy and Economics at the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR). In this position, he led USTR’s economic research unit from 2015-2021, and chaired the 21-agency Trade Policy Staff Committee.
Ed began his career on Capitol Hill before serving USTR as Policy Advisor to USTR Charlene Barshefsky from 1998 to 2001. He then led PPI’s Trade and Global Markets Project from 2001 to 2011. After PPI, he co-founded and directed the independent think tank ProgressiveEconomy until rejoining USTR in 2015. In 2013, the Washington International Trade Association presented him with its Lighthouse Award, awarded annually to an individual or group for significant contributions to trade policy.
Ed is the author of Freedom from Want: American Liberalism and the Global Economy (2007). He has published in a variety of journals and newspapers, and his research has been cited by leading academics and international organizations including the WTO, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund. He is a graduate of Stanford University and holds a Master’s Degree in International Affairs from Columbia Universities and a certificate from the Averell Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union.
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