{"id":19881,"date":"2018-03-28T07:56:08","date_gmt":"2018-03-28T11:56:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/?p=19881"},"modified":"2024-11-28T08:21:24","modified_gmt":"2024-11-28T13:21:24","slug":"a-naive-projection-of-the-growth-of-the-internet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2018\/03\/a-naive-projection-of-the-growth-of-the-internet.html","title":{"rendered":"A Naive Projection of the Growth of the Internet"},"content":{"rendered":"

\nJust as
\n
\nfour years ago I projected solar growth ten years ahead<\/a>,
\na quarter century ago I projected Internet growth ten years into the future:<\/p>\n

\n
\n\"A<\/a>
\n
\nGraph:
\n
\nA Naive Projection of the Growth of the Internet<\/a>,
\nJohn S. Quarterman, Matrix News 2.2, MIDS, February 1992.\n<\/p>\n

\nFrom 7.7 million Internet users in 1992, I projected the exponential
\ngrowth of the previous few years ahead a decade, to about
\n3.8 billion people in 2002.<\/p>\n

\nHow close was that estimate?<\/p>\n

According to
\n
\nInternet World Stats<\/a>,
\nin April 2002 there were about 0.558 billion Internet users worldwide.
\nSo by that number I was off by a factor of about 6.8,
\nand the same source says it took until 2017 to reach 3.8 billion.
\nFor the year 2000 I projected about 1 billion and the same source
\nsays there were about 0.3 billion, so I was off then only by
\na factor of about 3.3.
\nFor 1999 I projected about 0.5 billion, and the same source says
\nI was off by only a factor of about 2, which ain’t bad for seven years out.
\nWhy the sudden slump in Internet growth after 1999?<\/p>\n

\nWell, in 2000 the dot-com bubble burst, and Internet growth \t.
\ngreatly slowed for a while.
\nAs I wrote in 1992, it was a naive projection.
\nIt didn’t attempt to forecast economic downturns;
\nI never pretended to be Hari Seldon.<\/p>\n

\nPew Research, 22 December 2003,
\n
\nThe growth of the Internet population has slowed, but Internet users are doing more online<\/a>,<\/p>\n

\n

\nOnline activity has consistently grown over the course of our
\nresearch. Internet users discover more things to do online as they
\ngain experience and as new applications become available. This
\nmomentum often fuels increasing reliance on the Internet in everyday
\nlife and higher expectations about the things people can do online.\n<\/p>\n

\nDespite this growth in activity, the growth of the online population
\nitself has slowed. There was almost no growth over the course of
\n2002 and there has been only a small uptick in recent months to
\nleave the size of the online U.S. adult population at 63% of all
\nthose 18 and over.\n<\/p>\n

\nDifferent people use the Internet in different ways. The report is
\nfull of examples of how people in different demographic groups use
\nthe Internet for different purposes.\n<\/p>\n

\nExperience and the quality of online connections matter. Those with
\nmore experience online and those who have high-speed connections at
\nhome generally do more online more often than those with lower
\nlevels of experience and those with dial-up connections. The growth
\nof the cohort of veteran users, those with at least three years of
\nonline experience, has been striking. Nearly three-quarters of
\nInternet users have at least three years of experience.\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\nAnd it turns out a later issue of Matrix News<\/em>
\nled to one of the things Internet users started using the most:
\nAmazon; but that’s another story<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\nThe basis of this Internet user projection twenty five years ago was when I estimated
\n(How Big is the Matrix?<\/a>, Matrix News 2.2, February 1992)
\nsomewhere between 3.6 and 7.2 million people using
\nthe Internet proper, and between 7.7 and 14.2 million people using
\nthe Internet and all the other networks that would soon be subsumed
\ninto the Internet.<\/p>\n

\n

\nIt is clear that by the next presidential election,
\nin 1996, if not by the one this year,
\nnetwork users will be a force to be reckoned with.
\nThere are probably already more people on the networks in the United States
\nthan there are people in New Hampshire.
\nIn a few years, there will be moe than in California.<\/p>\n

\nNetwork users are used to expressing their opinions.
\nThey think, to some extent, differently than people who do not use networks,
\nbecause they are used to communicating with many people
\nacross boundaries of time, space, and politics.
\nThey have a powerful organizational medium at their fingertips.
\nWill they use that medium for political organizaitonn?
\nWill the social organization the medium naturally promotes affect politics anyway?
\nTo some extent these things are already happening.
\nHow much the effects on society and politics will increase as the networked population increases,
\nwe will see.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\nI didn’t predict that the Internet would be blamed for pretty much everything,
\nwhether or not it had anything to do with causing it.
\nBut for sure it does have political effects.<\/p>\n

\nBill Clinton and Al Gore did have an election website in 1996,
\nwith
\n
\na press release<\/a> featuring extensive comments by Gore,
\nin which he notes that the sitting Clinton-Gore administration was the
\nfirst to have email addresses and the first to get all cabinet officers online.
\nHe also noted:<\/p>\n

\n

\n…the assault weapons ban.<\/p>\n

\nIncidently on that point, it’s important to have home pages like
\nthese so that people can read for themselves the exact words that
\nthe candidates use and the exact words describing the
\naccomplishments that are under discussion. Yesterday Senator Dole
\nmade a statement that is really hard to interpret. It was apparently
\nabout the assault weapons ban — those three words were
\ncontiguous to one another in the Dole statement — but various
\npeople have scratched their heads and tried with great difficulty to
\ndecipher what he was trying to say.\n<\/p>\n

\nAnd I was interested to read in the morning news that the chief
\nlobbyist for the National Rifle Association, when asked for her
\ninterpretation of Senator Dole’s statement on the assault weapons
\nban, just smiled and said she knew for an absolute fact that he was
\nnot changing his position on the assault weapons ban, that he would
\nnot veto a repeal of the assault weapons ban, and she seemed to have
\nno difficulty whatsoever in interpreting what Senator Dole was
\nsaying. It’s important to have direct access — see for
\nyourself — but Senator Dole is wrong on the assault weapons
\nban, he was wrong when he filibustered the ban, he was wrong when he
\nsponsored an amendment that blocked the assault weapons ban, he was
\nwrong when he worked so hard to repeal the assault weapons ban, and
\nmade it a priority to repeal it, and he is just as wrong —
\ndead wrong — today, when he says that the ban is irrelevant.
\nSenator Dole thinks it’s enough just to keep these deadly weapons
\naway from felons. President Clinton thinks we should keep them off
\nour streets, period. There’s no room for weapons that are only meant
\nto kill and maim people in America.\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\nIn addition to the deja vu of the same discussion still going on two decades
\nlater, note Gore’s point:
\n“it’s important to have home pages like
\nthese so that people can read for themselves the exact words that
\nthe candidates use and the exact words describing the
\naccomplishments that are under discussion.”<\/p>\n

\nExperienced Internet users were also active in the elections that brought
\nus George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004.
\nBut the first presidential candidate to consciously and effectively
\nuse the Internet as a key tool to help win through
\nfundraising and organization was
\nBarack Obama in 2008.
\nSee
\n
\nThe Political Impact of the Internet on US Presidential Elections<\/a>,
\nValentino Larcinese and Luke Miner, 2017, STICERD – Economic Organisation and Public Policy Discussion Papers Series 63, Suntory and Toyota International Centres for Economics and Related Disciplines, LSE. <\/p>\n

\nAll this is to say that I was pretty close when I projected Internet growth
\na quarter century ago, and
\nso far Jon Wellinghoff and I are even closer
\n
\nin our Internet growth projections<\/a>.
\n21st century renewable sun and wind energy are the only power sources growing exponentially,
\nwith solar power growing faster.<\/p>\n

\nThis is what happened to one of the most prominent networks as the Internet took off:<\/p>\n

\n
\n\"BITNET<\/a>
\n
\n
\nBITNET in the U.S. and Worldwide, and the Internet<\/a>,
\nJohn S. Quarterman, Matrix News 4.10, MIDS, October 2014.\n<\/p>\n

\nAll the other networks fell the same way, so that you’ve probably never
\neven heard of them: FidoNet, UUCP, USENET, etc.
\n(You can actually still see and use USENET, but it is completely carried on the Internet now.)<\/p>\n

\n20th century fossil fuels including coal, oil, and the plutocrats’ failed hope
\nof natural gas, plus nuclear power, are all going down, just like those old networks did.<\/p>\n

\nSolar power
\n
\nwill win like the Internet did<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n -jsq\n<\/p>\n

Investigative reporting costs money, for open records requests, copying, web hosting, gasoline, and cameras, and with sufficient funds we can pay students to do further research. You can donate to LAKE today<\/a>!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Just as four years ago I projected solar growth ten years ahead, a quarter century ago I projected Internet growth ten years into the future: Graph: A Naive Projection of the Growth of the Internet, John S. Quarterman, Matrix News 2.2, MIDS, February 1992. From 7.7 million Internet users in 1992, I projected the exponential […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[216,49,132,6124,104,559,22,23,24,36],"tags":[8348,937,10229,8753,8701,8708,788,507,8741,2498,8702,12,7,10230,25,562,8737,8782,8713,637,8714,6,8716],"class_list":["post-19881","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-coal","category-elections","category-internet-access-speed","category-natural-gas-2","category-nuclear","category-oil","category-politics","category-renewable-energy","category-solar","category-wind","tag-al-gore","tag-barack-obama","tag-bill-clinton","tag-coal","tag-georgia","tag-georgia-power","tag-growth","tag-internet","tag-internet-access-speed","tag-jon-wellinghoff","tag-lake","tag-lowndes-area-knowledge-exchange","tag-lowndes-county","tag-matrix","tag-moores-law","tag-natural-gas","tag-nuclear","tag-oil","tag-renewable-energy","tag-rooftop","tag-solar","tag-valdosta","tag-wind"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19881","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19881"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19881\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24667,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19881\/revisions\/24667"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19881"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19881"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19881"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}