[15219] in Public-Access_Computer_Systems_Forum
FYIFrance: Internet in France, 2004
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jack Kessler)
Tue Mar 16 20:04:27 2004
Date: Mon, 15 Mar 2004 11:35:05 -0800
From: Jack Kessler <kessler@WELL.COM>
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FYIFrance: Internet in France, 2004
Periodically it is interesting to check out how the Internet "is
doing". So many of us take the Internet so much for granted, now,
that we forget that the vast majority of the planet still does
not even use it.
Internet "omnipresence" and "invisibility" are not even facts of
life, yet, in well over 1/2 of the so-very-wired USofA -- as the
Howard Dean presidential election campaign recently discovered,
to its very great cost -- and "household penetration rates", and
effective use of the new digital media, are not very advanced at
all, in too many other places. Digital information is getting
there, and is a lot further along than it was just a short time
ago, but it's not "there" yet.
So, how is the Internet doing in France?... Latest numbers, from
Network Wizards: their "top 20", as of January, 2004 --
Domain Hosts
TOTAL 233101481
net 100751276 Networks
com 48688919 Commercial
jp 12962065 Japan
edu 7576992 Educational
it 5469578 Italy
uk 3715752 United Kingdom
de 3421455 Germany
nl 3419182 Netherlands
ca 3210081 Canada
br 3163349 Brazil
au 2847763 Australia
tw 2777085 Taiwan
*fr* 2770836 France
us 1757664 United States
se 1539917 Sweden
dk 1467415 Denmark
be 1454350 Belgium
mil 1410944 US Military
mx 1333406 Mexico
org 1116311 Organizations
...
gov 607514 Government
...
cn 160421 China
in 86871 India
...
http://www.nw.com/
http://www.isc.org/index.pl?/ops/ds/
The above are the total numbers of IP addresses which have been
assigned a name: the list is the "Distribution of Top-Level
Domain Names by Host Count" -- and for discussion purposes here I
have added in .gov, and China and India...
There are so many problems with these statistics, as Network
Wizards and so many others have acknowledged and explained, for
so long. First come the definitions of "what is a host?" Then
come methodological problems of "pinging" and of assessing
responses. The Internet was not tailor-made for statistics -
gathering. (See: http://www.isc.org/index.pl?/ops/ds/)
And old problems of the "generics" abound: .net, .com, .edu,
.org, .gov... Breaking these down into "national" categories is
one of the most illustrative impossibilities of The New
Globalization: the Internet not only is international but it is
trans-national -- it spans all of the arbitrary "nation-state"
boundaries spawned originally by the old Peace of Westphalia.
The Internet is a sort of giant, and perhaps even _the_
quintessential, Non-Governmental Organization/NGO.
[See, amid the voluminous international relations literature on
the general point: Keohane & Nye, "Transnational Relations and
World Politics" (Harvard, 1972) and "Power and Interdependence"
(several editions), and Nye, "The Paradox of American Power : why
the world's only superpower can't go it alone" (Oxford, 2002).]
So nowadays there is no telling, really, how many "French" hosts
there are, in those ".net" and ".com" and ".edu" and ".org"
categories. It's like the bad old good old days of the ORTF
monopoly in France: when offshore radio and television stations,
"located" officially, in Belgium and Switzerland and elsewhere,
dominated French airwaves. Voltaire-at-Ferney, redux...
And now new trans-national categories are being implemented, in
addition, confusing the statistical picture even more: .aero,
.biz, .coop, .info, .int, .museum, .name, .pro... no idea how
"French", or non-"French", any of these are, now... statistical
cacaphony... But then perhaps our Brave New & Globalized world is
ready for the Demise of the Nation-State, now? Although so far
the new domains are showing tiny registrations: as of January --
biz 16680 Businesses
int 11594 International Organizations
info 8349 Info
name 217 Individuals
coop 148 Cooperatives
aero 132 Air-transport industry
museum 9 Museums
pro 2 Professionals
-- and such meager totals perhaps can be ignored here, so far.
And there is, still, the oldest Internet statistics problem, that
of translating "hosts" into "individual users": a single .museum
host in fact can represent hundreds of thousands of individual
Internet users. The Louvre or the British Museum, for example,
each with enormous staff and many thousands of both physical and
online visitors, all over the world... while a single .fr host
might represent only one little guy, holed up in a small
apartment in Lille... and said single "Internet user" in fact
might own several .fr "hosts"...
So, how to generalize? What do we know, when we know that there
are only 9 ".museum" Internet hosts, or 2,770,836 ".fr" Internet
hosts? Not a lot, perhaps...
But comparisons, particularly those made over time, may help:
Rank 1998 2004 %vs
dom hosts dom hosts 1998
TOTAL 29,669,611 TOTAL 233,101,481 186%
01 com 8,201,511 net 100,751,276 1908%
02 net 5,283,568 com 48,688,919 594%
03 edu 3,944,967 jp 12,962,065 1110%
04 jp 1,168,956 edu 7,576,992 192%
05 mil 1,099,186 it 5,469,578 2250%
06 us 1,076,583 uk 3,715,752 378%
07 de 994,926 de 3,421,455 344%
08 uk 987,733 nl 3,419,182 897%
09 ca 839,141 ca 3,210,081 383%
10 au 665,403 br 3,163,349 2699%
11 org 519,862 au 2,847,763 428%
12 gov 497,646 tw 2,777,085 1570%
13 fi 450,044 *fr* 2,770,836 831%
14 nl 381,172 us 1,757,664 163%
15 *fr* 333,306 se 1,539,917 483%
16 se 319,065 dk 1,467,415 921%
17 no 286,338 be 1,454,350 1654%
18 it 243,250 mil 1,410,944 128%
19 tw 176,836 mx 1,333,406 3201%
20 nz 169,264 org 1,332,978 256%
So, in the six years between 1998's "beginning of the Dotcom
Boom" era, and 2004's "Internet maturity" phase -- the overall
rate of increase slowed a bit, during 2001 and 2002, but then
picked up again strongly in 2003 -- a number of interesting
"national" things have happened, perhaps... "perhaps", given all
of the qualifications mentioned above, plus several more...
France, it seems, has added 831% to its stock of Internet
"hosts", over the past six years -- to its stock of Internet
hosts denominated ".fr", at any rate. This growth has been at a
rate double that of Germany/.de or the UK/.uk, and almost equal
to that of very well-wired Denmark/.dk.
And yet much more has been done too, apparently, in other places:
Mexico/.mx appears to have added a phenomenal number of Internet
hosts, 3201% over the period -- as have Belgium/.be (1654%) and
Brazil/.br (2699%) and, very interestingly for those in France,
their neighboring Italy/.it (2250%).
And the largest gains in all senses, it would seem, may have been
achieved in Japan: where domain ".jp" not only is the leading
non-USA "national" domain once again, but it also has added a
phenomenal 1110% to its already-enormous base of hosts.
Again, the labels are unreliable: plenty of people who are "in
Japan" are hard at work on .mil and .net and .edu and .com sites,
and for that matter on some .fr sites as well, perhaps -- and
plenty of people who are physically located far from the Far East
spend plenty of time online on .jp hosts.
But the numbers may be generally indicative, at least: of places
where growth may have been occurring, and where it may have been
occurring faster than others. The Internet in France has been
growing, then: faster than in some places, slower than in others.
Another consideration in assessing Internet statistics, though,
is national population: what point is there in counting "lots of
Internet hosts", in a nation, if there are not "lots of Internet
users" there to use them?
As mentioned already, here, there can be lone individuals who
maintain one or several personal Internet hosts -- and, at the
other extreme, a well-used Internet host may cater to hundreds of
thousands or even more Internet users.
The recent numbers here suggest a few startling developments,
plus a few which are distressing:
Domain hosts population national
(Jan 2004) (Jul 2003) population
per host
Total 233,101,481
jp 12,962,065 127,214,419 10
it 5,469,578 57,998,353 11
uk 3,715,752 60,094,648 16
de 3,421,455 82,398,326 24
nl 3,419,182 16,150,511 5
ca 3,210,081 32,207,113 10
br 3,163,349 182,032,604 58
au 2,847,763 19,731,984 7
tw 2,777,085 22,603,001 8
*fr* 2,770,836 60,180,529 22
se 1,539,917 8,878,085 6
dk 1,467,415 5,384,384 4
be 1,454,350 10,289,088 7
mx 1,333,406 104,907,991 79
cn 160,421 1,286,975,468 8,022
in 86,871 1,049,700,118 12,083
(Population estimates from:
http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/index.html)
So France, first of all, appears to enjoy a sort of approximate
parity with some of its European neighbors, now, in terms of
total population per available Internet hosts: 22 people per
host, in France, as against 24 now in Germany, or 16 in the UK.
The remarkable statistic here, however, is that of Italy: which
appears not only to have achieved phenomenal Internet growth,
recently, but also to have done so with a comparatively small
population -- so that today there seems to be one Internet host
for every 11 Italians. I'm curious to know how they've done this?
Then, too, there are the well-known extremes, which have been
true for several years: the heavy Internet concentrations in the
Netherlands (5 people per host), Australia (7), Taiwan (8),
Sweden (6), Belgium (7). These folks are among the "wired" of the
world: the most famous long have been the Finns and the Danes and
Norway, where there are 4 people per Internet, and above all
little Iceland, where there are 3 -- "It's cold, in Scandinavia",
a Norwegian friend once explained...
And the "distressing" news? Well, China and India, which together
account for over 1/3 of the world's people now, and which have
enjoyed some phenomenal rates of increase in domestic Internet
growth recently, still have a very long way to go... in spite of
all the current alarmist election-year noise, in the USofA, over
"offshoring" and "business product outsourcing" and "callcenters
in Bangalore" and "Globalization" and so on, which supposedly are
going to enrich them both and impoverish the US, overnight...
Any good analysis, and policy, also must add income and other
disparities to all of this population-talk, though. Total
national population-per-anything makes very little sense if only
a small minority of that total in fact have access to the "thing".
East Germany may account for that higher figure of people - per -
host reported by Germany as compared to France: fewer Internet
hosts in populous East Germany than in the wealthier West,
perhaps... Mezzogiorno Italy may have far fewer hosts available
than the wealthy North there possesses, too -- and recent
improvements in Italian distribution statistics always could
reflect some new national policy to beef up their poorer region?
Anywhere, though, the national population figures can be parsed
to reveal anomalies: the economic backwardness of Andalucia,
perhaps, for ".es" -- the wealth in the Southeast, in the UK/.uk,
far over-balancing the rest -- the US South, and hardcore tracts
of its inner cities, and the increasing US prison populations and
"underclass".
And the disparities are not all economic: politics and culture
and other factors can do much to separate masses, anywhere, from
the Internet and other luxuries enjoyed by small elites -- one
wonders how much real access there is, for example, among the 68+
million people of the Islamic Republic of Iran, now, to the 496
Internet hosts which they have managed to develop there.
For income disparities at least, though, there are figures
readily available now:
"Distribution of Family Income -- Gini index"
(For various years in the 1990s... This is basically the
difference between income of the richest and that of the poorest
families: the higher the figure the greater the disparity, and
the less accessible an Internet connection might be, if you are
poor. In order by number of Internet hosts in the domain -- )
jp 25
it 27
uk 37
de 30
nl 33
ca 32
br 61
au 35
tw 33
*fr* 33
us 41
se 25
dk 25
be 29
mx 53
cn 40
in 38
fi 26
no 26
http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/fields/2172.html
So Brazil's position perhaps is weakened: in spite of having many
Internet hosts, and a theoretical ability at least to provide one
for every 58 citizens, the fact that Brazil's income distribution
is among the worst in the world would indicate that the poor
there perhaps are not "online" -- and that it may be a long while
before the Mexican poor, as well, become truly "wired".
The US too, though, in spite of its Big Brother status generally
in allthingsdigital -- when .net and .com and the other generic
domains get included, the US position soars into the stratosphere
of the above list -- the US may have income disparity troubles
too, similar to those of Brazil and Mexico...
The US anomaly precludes statistical analysis here, in such a
short piece: not only must the various domains dominated by the
US and its users be aggregated together, but extensive US use of
overseas hosts -- ".fr" and ".uk" and all the rest -- as well as
increasing overseas use of US hosts, somehow must be divided out.
At a Gini coefficient for income disparity of 41, however, the US
cannot pretend that its "poor" have the same access to any goods
and services, very much including Internet access, which "poor"
citizens of France and Sweden and Denmark enjoy.
Per the above, US income disparities put the poorer US citizen
more on a par with a citizen in India, or China, if not (yet?) as
disadvantaged as someone "poor" might be in Mexico, or in
Brazil... And current fiscal and other policies appear to be
increasing the rich / poor divide, in the US. Income disparity is
not the only source of disadvantage, so in other social and
political areas the US still may be ahead of some; but it does
take money, to use the Internet.
So, interesting statistics... France comes out well in 2004, I
think: not among the world leaders in Internet growth, any
longer, at least on a percentage basis for "host" development --
with the notable exception of Italy, that position seems reserved
now for the non-US and non-European nations, particularly Japan.
But France still is providing well for its population: both in
terms of the number of Internet hosts made available, and in the
economic access of the average French citizen to them. Some are
doing better than France; many are doing considerably worse.
My greatest hope is that others here will become interested in
all of this, and either will direct me to recent analyses which
fully answer all of the questions posed here, or will undertake
such analyses themselves... As in all things digital, there is
too much data available now about all of this: the challenge is
to ask the right questions of it, I believe -- and I don't see
those questions being asked too often, myself.
--oOo--
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