2010 Internet Penetration Rates

Today's post comes courtesy of data available from Internet World Stats. The map below presents the most recent statistics on global internet usage. The shading reflects the proportion of the population that uses the internet within each country. The height of each bar indicates the total number of internet users in each country.

Iceland has the world's highest penetration rate: over 93% of the population are internet users. Almost all of Europe and North America also have relatively high rates (at least at the national scale, as there are likely to be significant digital divides in every country). China, interestingly, is already home to the world's largest population of internet users (384 million) despite having a penetration rate of less than 30%. India is another interesting case. 81 million Indians are internet users (there are more Indian internet users than there are people in the UK), yet this represents only 7% of the Indian population.