This depicts the number of home broadband subscribers per 100 people. As we can see, Western Europe, North America, Australia, China, South Korea, and Japan far outpace the rest of the world, with a couple outliers found in the least populous countries. Additionally, the South American country of French Guyana counts as France for the purposes of the World Bank accounting. Notice how small, rich countries like Israel and the UAE have access rates at or above their more developed counterparts. Data was sourced from the World Bank and collected in 2017.

We see a slightly different scenario when it comes to cell phone subscriptions. The poorest countries (i.e. Sub-Saharan Africa) still lack connectivity, but developing economies tend to favor cell phone over fixed broadband service. This is likely due to the marginal costs of laying copper/fiber being much higher than using the equivalent wireless technology. Data was sourced from the World Bank and collected in 2017.

The contrast between poor and rich countries is very evident when we look at the number of internet-connected servers per person, with Western Europe taking the obvious lead. Interestingly, some unexpected countries appear like Peru, South Africa, and New Zealand precisely because they are conveniently located with respect to undersea cables that form the 'back-bone' of the internet. Data was sourced from the World Bank and collected in 2017.

MAC Addresses are globally unique identifiers for every internet-connected device. They serve as the physical address for your wifi radio, ethernet port, or bluetooth chip so that your traffic does not arrive on someone else's device. As we can see, many countries have zero registered manufacturers with China and the US taking the bulk of the assignments. This is not a lack of data, but an authoritaive list provided by the IEEE, collected in 2019.

IXPs, or Internet Exchange Points are co-location buildings where different content providers and network providers meet. This is where Netflix meets Facebook meets your cellular provider. In many cases, these buildings are located near ports so as to accomodate the fiber 'back-bone' of the Internet. As you can see, this corroborates the data above.

The net result of this is an Internet infrastructure that makes us consumers more than creators, in which China exporting more than twice the next country and many countries are not exporting any high tech products. This data was sourced from the World Bank and collected in 2017. Despite the ubiquity of the Internet across the world, the hierharchical model that we've inherited is fundamentally broken. Imagine a world in which the Internet was truly decentralized.

Imagine a world where users produced their own content, hosted it on computers hosted in their city, shared it with their neighbors and monetized the content locally. The good news is that world is possible. To read more about this globe-spanning open-source project, checkout