Global Geographies of the Internet

In December, 2011, more than 2.25 billion people used the internet, making it a tool of communications, entertainment, and other applications accessed by roughly 32 % of the world’s population (www.​internetworldsta​ts.​com/​stats.​htm). For most users these uses extend well beyond email, the most common internet use, to include: bill payments and electronic banking; job and housing searches; stock trading; “e-tail” shopping; searching for health information and news; online classes; digital gambling; online videogames; Voice Over Internet Protocol telephony; hotel and airline reservations; chat rooms; electronic tax payments; downloading television programs, movies, digital music, and pornography; and popular sites and services such as YouTube, Facebook, and Google. In all these ways, and more, cyberspace offers profound real and potential effects on social relations, everyday life, culture, politics, and other social activities. Indeed, for rapidly rising numbers of people around the world, the “real” and the virtual have become thoroughly interpenetrated. In this light, access to cyberspace is no longer a luxury, but a necessity. As its applications have multiplied, the internet is having enormous impacts across the globe, including interpersonal interactions and everyday life, identity formation, retail trade and commerce, governance, and is affecting the structure and form of cities, in the process generating round upon round of non-Euclidean geometries in the context of a massive global wave of time–space compression.

To appreciate the complexity, implications, and geography of the internet, it is vital to understand where it came from and how it came to be. Toward this end, this chapter sketches the broad outlines of the world’s internet in several stages. It opens with an overview of the seminal technologies that make the internet possible, fiber optics and satellites, which together comprise the infrastructure of cyberspace. Second it traces some of the highlights of the internet’s history, from its origins with the U.S. military to its explosive growth and commercialization today. In the process, it charts the uneven geographies of growth over time and space. The third section addresses the digital divide, or sociospatial inequalities in internet usage, which are found to one extent or another across the planet. Finally, the chapter concludes with a brief regional survey of internet usage in various world regions to highly the spatially uneven character of its deployment and implications.

Of all of the innumerable myths that swarm around cyberspace, one of the most insidious is that the internet is an inherently emancipatory tool, a device that necessarily and inevitably promotes democracy by giving voice to those who lack political power, and in so doing undermines authoritarian and repressive governments.

The impacts of telecommunications on businesses include a varieties of activities often lumped together under the term e-commerce, which includes both business-to-business (B2B) transactions as well as those linking firms to their customers (B2C) and customers-to-businesses (C2B). E-commerce takes a variety of forms, including electronic data interchange (e.g., inventory data, digital invoices and contracts, purchase orders, and product updates), internet recruiting and advertising, web-based banking and stock trading, electronic retail shopping, and digital gambling. For the most part, this activity is restricted to large commercial actors, although many observers hope that the internet will open opportunities for small and medium sized establishments to reach out to national and global markets. Digital convergence of hitherto distinct media has opened new possibilities in internet video and telephony. Advocates maintain that the internet will open opportunities for undercapitalized small and medium sized establishments (SMEs) to access national and global markets.

As the internet has spread in size and scope, its applications have included the interactions between many governments and their citizens. In addition to the growth of personal and commercial uses of the internet, electronic government, or e-government, expanded in tandem throughout the world. User-friendly graphical interfaces expedited this process enormously and opened the possibility of two-way flows of digital information between citizens and their states (and more recently, have paved the way for mobile governance, or m-government). There are many definitions of e-government (Yildiz 2007), but all essentially point to the use of information technologies (typically the internet) to facilitate the delivery of government information and services, restructure administrative procedures, and enhance citizen participation. Not surprisingly, the topic has drawn considerable scholarly.

Today, more people are better connected to one another, and the world, than at any other time in human history. For vast segments of the world’s population, mobile phones, the internet and email, instant messaging, and various forms of digital social media have become deeply woven into the fabric of daily life.