The Internet

The Internet is the fastest-growing tool of communicationever. It took radio broadcasters 38 years to reach an audience of 50 million, television 13 years, and the Internet just 4 years. A NeXT computer used by Tim Berners-Lee was the world’s first web server.

Domain registration was free until the National Science foundation decided to change this on September 14th, 1995. The first ever domain name registered online was www.symbolics.com. All three letter word combinations from aaa.com to zzz.com are already registered as domain names. One million domain names are registered every month. Almost half of people online have at least three e-mail accounts.

According to Message Labs spam accounts for over 60 per cent of all email. Google says at least one third of all Gmail servers are filled with spam. Anthony Greco, aged 18, became the first person arrested for spam (unsolicited instant messages) on February 21, 2005. Yahoo started out as “Jerry and David’s guide to the world Wide Web”. Jerry Yang and David Filo were PhD candidates at Stanford in 1994 when they started the site.

The first internet worm was created by Robert Morris, Jr, and attacked more than 6,000 Internet hosts. Only 4 per cent of Arab women use the Internet. Moroccan women represent almost a third of that figure. Official statistics in the UK say that 29 per cent of women have never used the internet, but only 20 percent of men. 220 million tons of old computers and other technological hardware are trashed in the United States each year.

The United States generates more e-waste than any other nation. An estimated 50-80% of e-waste collected in the United States for recycling is exported to areas such as China, India or Pakistan. In February 2009, Twitter had a monthly growth (of users) of over 1300 per cent several times more than Facebook. Facebook is growing at a dizzying rate around the globe, surging to nearly 500 million users, from 200 million users just 15 months ago, writes The New York Times’s Miguel Helft.