2022 66%
2018 50%
2012 34%
2009 25%
2002 10%
1990 0.05%
The venerable International Telecommunications Union (ITU), the world’s oldest “international organization,” has been printing, telegraphing, broadcasting, and posting telecom data since its launch in 1865.* Its most recent look at the digital world, out last September, finds 5.3 billion people, or two-thirds of the world’s 8 billion population, now have internet access. Two observations on this:
(1) This year’s 5.3 billion internet users are nearly three times the 2.0 billion ITU counted in 2010; over ten times the 0.4 billion it found in 2000; and about 1,000 times the roughly 3 million comp sci students, telecom enthusiasts, and government officials using the pre-WWW, copper-cable-based networks of 1990. In high-income countries, more than 90% of people are now online, with the exceptions (if the U.S. is a good sample) mostly infants and elderly people who don’t want service. Many of the newer users — 600 million have logged on since the COVID pandemic — are now in lower-income regions: Least-developed country use has jumped from 89 million to 407 million since 2015, and 40% of sub-Saharan African households are now online, as against 11% in 2015.
(2) Information exchange is rising faster than user count. ITU estimated 1,230 terabits of bandwidth in use every second (Tbps) in 2022, up from 979 Tbps in 2021, and four times the 292 Tbps it found in 2017. About 40% of data exchange goes on in Asia, which accounted for 542 of the 1,230 TBps last year. Europe added 242 TBps, the Western Hemisphere (including the U.S., Canada, the Caribbean, and Latin America) 224, and the rest of the world 220.
Intellectual and cultural assessments of the rising user counts and accelerating data exchanges are always pretty subjective. Economic measurements are also often murky, but there are some useful gauges, especially with respect to the U.S.. The OECD, for example, estimates that the $25 trillion U.S. economy now includes $112 billion in annual sales of data and data-related advertising, and that data stocks are worth about $421 billion in national “wealth.” With respect to trade, the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis reports $89 billion in U.S. exports of information and communications services and $594 billion in digitally deliverable services in 2021 — together, more than a quarter of the $2.26 trillion in total U.S. exports.
In purely physical terms, the growth in user counts will have to slow down by the late 2020s. But the scale of information exchange can easily keep rising, since the physical capacity to carry data continues to grow both under the oceans and above the atmosphere. The glass-watchers at TeleGeography, for example, see 552 submarine cables operating in 2023, with 33 new ones scheduled to go live this year and 19 more so far in 2024. Meanwhile, satellites are handling larger shares of data flow, and 1,000 to 1,500 new ones go into orbit each year.
In ‘governance’ terms, however, questions about fraying policies and thickening cyber-borders seem to be intensifying even as the Internet accommodates more users and carries more information. Examples: steady interest among lots of governments in digital service taxation; last year’s efforts, especially from India, to end the WTO’s 24-year-old “moratorium” on tariffs for digital transmissions; and the quiet but intense ideological tug-of-war between the “internet sovereignty” concepts proposed by authoritarian governments and the “multi-stakeholder”/free flow of data views held traditionally by the U.S. and most liberal democracies, and elaborated in last year’s 61-country Declaration for the Future of the (“open, free, global, interoperable, reliable, and secure”) Internet.
* Created to deal with the questions raised by the deployment of the first telegraph cables; converted into a League of Nations organization in 1919, and a U.N.-specialized agency more recently.
ITU’s 2023 “Facts and Figures” report on internet populations, data exchange, smartphone use, and more worldwide and by region.
OECD researchers measure the value of U.S.-held and -exchanged data.
And BEA tallies U.S. ICT and digitally deliverable services trade.
PPI on digital issues:
Chief Economist Michael Mandel reports on the high-performance U.S. digital economy post-COVID crisis (lower inflation than the rest of the economy, net gain of +1.4 million jobs or 66% of net private-sector job creation).
… Jordan Shapiro on privacy.
… And Malena Dailey on the risk of overenthusiastic antitrust.
Policy:
The State Department’s Bureau of Cyberspace and Digital Policy.
… and the 61-country Declaration for the Future of the Internet, including 39 in Europe, five in the Pacific, three in Africa, one in the Middle East, and 9 in the Western Hemisphere (of which two are Caribbean, two North American, one Central American, and four South American).
… the WTO’s digital technology and trade site.
… the African Union’s continental digital strategy.
… the OECD debates digital services taxes.
… China’s White Paper on digital policy, “Jointly to Build a Community With a Shared Future in Cyberspace.”
… and perceptions of Chinese digital strategy from U.S. non-governmental analysts at Pacific Forum, via the State Department.
Sea and space:
TeleGeography’s summary of fiber-optic cable deployment.
… and its interactive cable map, with search by year of deployment, countries and landing points, etc.
… and Reuters on cable deployment, geopolitics, and U.S.-China rivalry.
SpaceFlightNow’s launch calendar for 2023.
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 Progressive Economy 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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