North East is slow to embrace the internet
Aug 28 2008 by Peter Jackson, The Journal
TWO thirds of UK households, or almost 16.5m, now have internet access, up 1.2m on the year, according to official figures.
The Office of National Statistics goes on to tell us that more than two thirds of adults go online every day, or almost every day, Sadly, it also tells us North Easterners are least likely to have internet access.
The rise of the internet has truly been phenomenal. It is estimated that in December 1995 there were some 16m users worldwide, representing just 0.4% of the world’s population. By June of this year, it was believed that more than 1.4bn people, or 22% of the world’s population, are internet users.
It has made that dream of the 1970s idealist – the global village – into something approaching reality.
It has revolutionised the way we communicate and it has, of course, transformed the way we do business. For a very small investment anyone can have a web page, reaching a global market, and anyone can seek out the best supplier offering the keenest prices.
To me, one of the most striking things about the internet is that its implications were appreciated from the earliest stage. The possibilities for business were early recognised and so was the importance of research into, and investment in, this new medium. I also believe, however, that the attendant explosion in email usage has taken the world by surprise, and I suspect that a further future development will be an acceleration of global dominance by the English language.
An important question for the future is what regulation the internet might face. The UN has set up a Working Group on Internet Governance, and its involvement was inevitable given the international nature of the internet.
It has been commonly argued that individual nation states cannot hope to regulate a medium which knows no borders. You should try telling that to the Chinese government, which employs an estimated 30,000 internet police to enforce its various systems of censorship.
This is the greatest threat to the continued development of the internet; that governments, democratic as well as authoritarian, won’t be able to resist the urge to regulate: governments never can.
For a very small investment anyone can have a web page, reaching a global market
