1.
Internet Population The NRO also publishes data on the allocation of IP addresses
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, as in [1].
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 freedoms, which, as
Nobel-Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen points out, are
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.
1.1 Definition of Internet Population
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.
(IPv4 and IPv6) and Autonomous System Numbers collected
from the RIRs.
1.2 Internet Measure techniques
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.
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.

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.
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 .

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 TABLE: Comparative Estimate of Internet Users
to be a universal second language, native English speakers will Worldwide[10]
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.

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.
Estimates of the number of internet users around the world vary
1.3 Example recent Internet populations Statistics substantially, as the Table1 illustrate

There are multiple sources for getting the worldwide internet-

using population statistics. Because of differences in
methodology, comparative measurements for the internet user
vary widely depending on the source.
Table Internet Usage Statistics
(//www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm )

Population Internet Usage,

World Regions
( 2006 Est.) Latest Data

Africa 915,210,928 32,765,700

Asia 3,667,774,066 394,872,213

Europe 807,289,020 308,712,903

Middle East 190,084,161 19,028,400

North America 331,473,276 229,138,706

Latin
553,908,632 83,368,209
America/Caribbean
Oceania / Australia 33,956,977 18,364,772

WORLD TOTAL 6,499,697,060 1,086,250,903