1. What is the number of people with access to the internet today? Do all of them have equal and unrestricted access to the internet?

    Around 4.57 billion people across the world 1 have access to the internet today. Other statistics point it at being around 50% of the world’s population2 3, which would bring the number a little below 4 billion people. This includes people accessing the internet from any device, both mobile phones and desktop devices.

    Not everyone has equal access - broadband subscription percentage is only 40% in countries like South Korea and Germany 4. Some countries also restrict access to the internet, such as China’s great firewall 5 6.

  2. How many pages/websites exist as part of the internet? What percent of them belong to the surface web and the Deep/Dark web?

    Indexed pages: A 2017 report 7 mentions that Google’s index contains over 130 trillion pages. The listed source, Google’s howsearchworks page, currently places a vague figure of “hundreds of billions”

    Deep web: Often confused with the dark web, it’s much larger than that. Commonly cited research from 2001 estimates that the Deep Web as a whole is 400 to 500 times the size of the “surface web” 8. Assuming the estimates to carry over, that would put it at around 650,000 trillion pages.

    Dark web: It’s a bit hard to get exact figures on the size of the Dark Web, but a reasonable proxy is Tor traffic percentages. One of the founders of the Tor project has said 9 that only around 3% of Tor traffic was used to connect to “Hidden services”. This puts the estimate at around 19,500 trillion pages.

  3. What is the volume of internet traffic that flows through the internet daily?

    Answer

  4. What is the size of the internet in total data today? (Include all media content + text as well as other data in your estimation)

    Answer

  5. What are the most popular 3-4 web server frameworks for hosting websites? What is their market share?

    Answer

  1. https://www.statista.com/statistics/617136/digital-population-worldwide/↩︎

  2. https://ourworldindata.org/internet#internet-access↩︎

  3. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/it.net.user.zs↩︎

  4. https://ourworldindata.org/internet#broadband-access↩︎

  5. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/chinas-scary-lesson-to-the-world-censoring-the-internet-works/2016/05/23/413afe78-fff3-11e5-8bb1-f124a43f84dc_story.html↩︎

  6. https://www.dezshira.com/library/legal/cyber-security-law-china-8013.html↩︎

  7. https://searchengineland.com/googles-search-indexes-hits-130-trillion-pages-documents-263378↩︎

  8. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=jep;view=text;rgn=main;idno=3336451.0007.104↩︎

  9. https://www.theregister.com/2017/07/29/tor_dark_web/↩︎