We estimated the cost of an hour of internet access in a sample of 14 densely urbanized, global cities and contrasted these estimates with the cost of an hour of internet access in 69 regional cities and provincial capitals in 2000 and 2005. ((All valued adjusted to 2005 U.S. Dollars)) For the purposes of this study, global cities are defined as those with a population over 10 million in the year 2000, and regional centers are defined as cities with a population of over 1 million in the same country as a global city. ((Using over 40 travel guides, published between 2000 and 2007, we compiled multiple reports of the cost of going online for one hour in as many cities as possible.)) The number of secondary cities with internet access grew significantly between 2000 and 2005. In 2000, 33 of the 83 secondary urban centers we surveyed had commercial internet access points. By 2005, 71 secondary urban centers reported internet access.

GRAPHIC: Average Cost of One Hour of Internet Access

The average cost of hourly internet access in a country’s secondary cities is usually less than that in a country’s primary cities. Adjusting to 2005 dollars, the average cost in 2000 in all cities was $4.46 an hour, and the average cost in 2005 in all cities dropped to $1.67. By comparison, the cost of internet access in primary cities dropped from $5.92 to $1.89 per hour, and the cost of access in secondary cities dropped from $3.52 to $1.74.

GRAPHIC: Cost of One Hour of Internet Access: Global Cities v. Regional Centers

The urban digital divide between primary and secondary cities is closing, but in different patterns around the world. Today, in Brazil, India, and Indonesia the cost of internet access in primary cities is about the same as in secondary cities. The cost of access has also dropped in Russia cities, Japanese cities, and China’s secondary cities. But in China, Japan, and Russia there is still a digital divide between primary and secondary cities.

In wealthiest cities between 2000 and 2005, cost of an hour of Internet access for average people dropped significantly, from 26 percent of daily income to 7 percent. ((Using over 40 travel guides, published between 2000 and 2007, we compiled multiple reports of the cost of going online for one hour in as many cities as possible.))

The cost of going online fell as average income rose. ((All valued adjusted to 2005 U.S. Dollars; gross domestic product adjusted to purchasing power parity, per capita, from the World Bank’s World Development Indicators)) In many developing cities, however, cost of going online didn’t fall as dramatically, nor did incomes rise as fast. People in those cities spent 40 percent of their daily income to use the Internet in 2000 compared to 14 percent in 2005.

GRAPHIC: Percentage of Daily Income Spent on One Hour of Internet Access

In Lagos and Rio, the relative cost of going online for the average person has actually increased over time.

GRAPHIC: The Persistent Digital Divide Among Rich and Poor Global Cities

In other words, an hour of internet access in a cyber café can cost the resident of a developing city twice as much of their daily income as such access can cost the resident of a developed city.

Public libraries serve a broader clientele, often by providing internet terminals and access to electronic databases. But not every country’s library infrastructure is up to the challenging task of being an information gateway for citizens. Not all national, university, and public libraries have the capacity to maintain a website, and not all provide website access in the range of languages that their citizens read, write, and speak.

GRAPHIC: Comparing the World’s Wired Libraries

Three fourths of national libraries have Web sites but only 54 percent load in the country’s national language. For example, Tajikistan’s national library offers online access in Russian, but not Tajik. Sixty-nine percent of national libraries load in English but only 20 to 25 percent of the world’s people speak English.

For each country we determined whether there were websites for five branches of the government (legislative, judiciary, and executive branches, as well as the revenue authority and foreign affairs ministry).

Even though every country in the world has been assigned a top-level domain name, not all have the organizational will or capacity to maintain websites for these important government offices. WIA researchers found URLs for as many government agency websites for as many countries as possible. Then, using a traceroute program, we attempted to find the location of the host computer for these websites.

Most wealthy countries devote significant resources to maintaining internet portals for important government offices. Some wealthy countries even maintain mirror hosts within the United States, so that queries coming from within the United States may be answered more quickly. But poorer countries are less likely to have the informational infrastructure to maintain websites for their government agencies. E-government services may be less of a priority because other development priorities take precedent or because too few citizens would use such services. Many governments developing countries do not have the technical capacity to maintain such online portals, so they retain commercial hosting services in North America and Europe.

In this interesting way, many developing countries are dependent on wealthier countries because their informational capacity physically resides in those wealthier countries.

National Dependency in the Information Age

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For several decades, African governments have been encouraged to reform their telecommunications sector through:

• Regulatory Separation–formally separating regulatory authority from the executive branch of government.
• Privatization–selling the government’s majority stake in public telecommunications companies.
• Market Liberalization–introducing competition in telecommunications markets.
• Regulatory Depoliticization–making the regulatory authority independent of political influence

Over time, the number of countries pursuing these types of reforms has increased. By 2006, 36 of 53 African countries had separated the regulatory authority from their executive branches of government, 29 privatized their public telecommunications provider, 26 liberalized their telephony markets, and 18 depoliticized their regulatory authority. ((Data for the period 1977-1999 from Henisz, Witold J., Zelner, Bennet A., & Mauro F. Guillen. (2005, December). “The Worldwide Diffusion of Market-Oriented Infrastructure Reform, 1977-1999.” American Sociological Review, 70, 871-897. Data for the period 2000-2007 collected by WIA research team, and reported in Howard, Philip N. “Testing the Leap-Frog Hypothesis: Assessing the Impact of Extant Infrastructure and Telecommunication Policy on the Global Digital Divide.” Information, Communication & Society 10, no. 2 (2007): 133-57.))

These reforms have many consequences: Mobile phones are widely available in many African cities, long-distance calls are cheaper than ever before, and many local entrepreneurs have started new businesses in this sector.

However, one consequence of privatization is that governments find it difficult to provide leadership in developing informational infrastructure for their countries. This is especially true when it comes to internet infrastructure.

GRAPHIC: Policy Reform & IT Infrastructure in Africa

Even though the number of internet hosts around the world has grown significantly since 1990, the relative portion of hosts residing in Africa has actually declined. ((Data on top-level domain names from the “Domain Name Survey” of the Internet Software Consortium. For 2005, the values for hosts were adjusted by Zook (2006) to associate top-level domain names such as *.org and *.com with particular nation-states.)) In 1995, only 1.6 percent of the world’s internet hosts were stationed in African countries, and by 2005 this portion had declined to 0.7 percent. While African governments have come under international pressure to pursue certain kinds of policy reforms, the informational capacity of many African states has, in relative terms, declined.

World Political Parties Online, 2000-2007

Interestingly, the number of wired political parties dropped over time. This is likely because the country coverage improved over time. In addition, researchers had to make a strategic choice about how to code joke political parties that have no real party organization, but do have a web presence. We decided to only cover major and minor parties that field candidates for election, and to exclude joke parties.

In countries where political parties are illegal, the research team also had to make strategic decisions on which websites to code. In such countries organized political groups are often called social movements or associations, and these kinds of groups were included in the search.

World Information Access researchers, who review trends in the global digital divide, studied data on political party Web sites from 2000 ((Data generously shared by Dr. Pippa Norris)) , 2005 ((Data collected by WIA researchers December 2005)) and 2007 ((Data collected by WIA researchers May 2007)). They covered 212 countries and thousands of political parties—3,217 parties in 2007 alone.

Broken down by ideological affiliation, the vast majority of organized political parties in Muslim countries are secular, and there is significant ideological diversity. While 11 percent of the political parties were classified as Islamic fundamentalist, 60 percent either either conservative, liberal or socialist. ((Most parties were cataloged based on information available on their website or in major news media coverage about the political parties. Additional sources were consulted where needed, including Charles Kurzman, Liberal Islam: A Sourcebook (Oxford University Press, 1998).))

GRAPHIC: Political Parties in the Muslim World, By Party Type

This boom in online political life in Muslim countries is surprising given the digital divide between rich and poor countries. Wealthier ones have more high-speed broadband service, which means citizens get more information more quickly. In contrast, many citizens in poorer countries continue using dial-up services, which are slower but less expensive.

In the United States, some 1.9 billion records have been exposed, either through poor management or hacker intrusions: about nine personal digital records compromised for every adult. There were more reported incidents in 2005 and 2006 than in the previous 25 years combined, and while businesses have long been the primary organizations hemorrhaging personal records, colleges and universities are increasingly implicated.

Excluding a particularly large security breach at Acxiom, hackers account for the largest volume of compromised records, some 45 percent, while 27 percent of the volume is attributed to organizational mismanagement and 28 remains unattributed. But in terms of incidents, 9 percent were an unspecified type of breach, 31 percent of the incidents involved hackers, and 60 percent of the incidents involved organizational mismanagement: personally identifiable information accidentally placed online, missing equipment, lost backup tapes, or other administrative errors.

We conducted a search of incidents of electronic data loss reported in major U.S. news media from 1980 to 2006. These included print publications with national circulation such as the New York Times, the L.A. Times, and USA Today, along with major broadcast news media. Because some news reports contained references to more than one incident, we employed a snowball methodology to expand our analysis by including additional security breaches mentioned in the same article. Duplicate entries were eliminated by comparing news stories on the basis of organizations involved, dates, and other incident details. In cases where papers reported different quantities of lost records, we chose the most conservative report. We also consulted lists of electronic data breaches compiled by third party computer security advisories, such as the Identity Theft Resource Center and Attrition.org. Our method yielded 589 incidents, 550 of which were successfully cross-checked with LexisNexis and Proquest to ensure accuracy, and 39 of which we discarded for involving citizens of other countries or for being unverifiable in major news media reports.

This paper will be published as:

Erickson, Kris, and Philip N. Howard. “A Case of Mistaken Identity? News Accounts of Hacker and Organizational Responsibility for Compromised Digital Records, 1980–2006.” Journal of Computer Mediated Communication 12, no. 4 (2007).

On average, in 2005 personal records were compromised at a rate of 5.2 million a month. On average, in 2006 personal records were compromised at a rate of 5.8 million a month. Assuming a similar rate of growth, by November or December this year we we should cross the 2.0 billion mark. This is a conservative estimate because many of the news stories we archived were conservative on their own estimates of how many records were lost in particular incidents, and because a small number of incidents are reported without details of how many personal records were compromised.

View figures and tables of this paper as a *.pdf.

View pre-publication draft of paper as a *.pdf.

View dataset of incidents as a *.xls.

View University of Washington Press office news release on this research.

In some countries, journalists and pundits are unable to report the news in traditional print or broadcast media, and have turned to the Internet.  In other countries, news is generated by online journalists who write for a national audience, but write from abroad where they can be safe. ((Staff Research. (2006). World Information Access Report. Seattle, WA: World Information Access Project, Department of Communication, University of Washington.))

There are several factors that can explain why a country’s news industry might grow online.  Countries that have a lot of internet users, where the cost of running a traditional print or broadcast media is high, can be expected to have a significant online news industry.  At the same time, countries without a tradition of independent media, or slow Internet connections, may be less likely to have an online news industry.  

Researchers  looked at 100 countries, and compared them on four features.

1. Internet users per capita
2. Online newspapers per capita
3. Online newspapers per daily print newspaper
4. Daily newspapers per capita

The countries with the largest online news industry are said to be those with a relatively high daily print newspaper industry, a larger proportion of internet users per capita, a larger proportion of online newspapers per capita, and a larger proportion of online newspapers per daily newspaper. ((Download WIA graphic: bottom two quartiles, top two quartiles.))

In the developing world, the countries with relatively large online news industries (top quartile in multiple factors) include Argentina, Belize, Brazil, Costa Rica, Lebanon, Mexico, Sri Lanka, Suriname, Turkey and the Ukraine.

The information society is not as pervasive as we would expect. Around the world, access to key information and communications technologies, such as mobile phones and the Internet, has improved. But the distribution of hosts and secure servers among the world’s populations has worsened, and the trend towards equally distributed computing resources around the world has actually reversed in recent years. ((Staff calculations based on data from:  International Telecommunication Union. (2005). World Telecommunication Indicators. Geneva: International Telecommunication Union; World Bank. (2006). World Development Indicators. Washington, D.C.: The World Bank.))

One of the most common ways of measuring how a resource is distributed among a population is through GINI coefficients. In a perfectly equal society, 23 percent of the population has 23 percent of the resources, 90 percent of the population has 90 percent of the resources. A more equal society will have a low GINI coefficient, and a society in which resources are highly concentrated will have a high GINI coefficent. But technology resources are not evenly distributed between the countries and peoples of the world.

Using data on the number of mobile phones, Internet hosts, Internet users, personal computers, and secure servers around the world in 1995, 2000 and 2005, GINI coefficients reveal how equally these resources are distributed. ((Download WIA spreadsheets:  Summary; Mobile Phones - By Country; Mobile Phones - By Population; Internet Hosts - By Country; Internet Hosts - By Population; Secure Servers – By Country; Secure Servers - By Population; Personal Computers - By Country; Personal Computers - By Population; Internet Users – By Country; Internet Users - By Population))

More important, the coefficients reveal how the distribution of information technologies between these countries – between 160 and 240 countries, depending on the technology – has changed over the last decade.

Since the mobile phone market has opened and the cost of mobile phones has decreased in the last decade, it is not surprising that the distribution of mobile phones by country and by population has improved significantly. Similarly, the proportion of a country’s population with some Internet access has smoothed out over the last decade, with more public and private Internet access points opening in homes around the world. The last 10 years have seen little change in the distribution of personal computers between countries, and in the last five years there has been little change in the distribution of secure servers between countries.

Surprisingly, several key communications technologies are more unequally distributed today than they were in 1995. Internet hosts have been more evenly distributed among the world’s populations, but are increasingly concentrated in a few countries with large populations. In other words, India and China have large populations and large numbers of Internet users, and over the last decade have added a large number of hosts to the Internet. Compared with previous years, proportionally fewer hosts in 2005 used domain names assigned to less populous, but still developing countries. Relative to population, the distribution of secure servers is more concentrated today than it was five years ago.

While there has been little change in the distribution of personal computers between countries, the distribution of personal computers between people improved between 1995-2000, but then worsened between 2000-2005. In other words, the trend towards an evening distribution of personal computers around the world reversed in recent years. Even though open markets may have brought mobile phones to many parts of the planet, it is not clear that personal computer technologies will have the same pattern of diffusion.

Researchers assembled information from the UNESCO website and the UNESCO Statistical Yearbook, as well as the Internet Systems Consortum website, and listed each country with its respective statistics before recalculating the data according to geographic regions. Much like we expected, book production figures were high in core countries such as those located in Europe. What is surprising, though, is that large portions of Latin America and Asia – regions that are predominantly made up of developing countries – had the second highest book production figure.

In addition to this, we also noticed that most underdeveloped countries had very low book production, but relatively high numbers of web hosts. From this we concluded that those countries may have skipped the age of written information and jumped straight to online records, a trend that could be attributed to the flow of foreign aid from more advanced nations. It should be noted, however, that the figures UNESCO labeled as current 2003 data seemed to be the same figures the organization listed for 1999. Despite this, we still believe that there is enough of a pattern using statistics from the other years to safely assume that developing countries are drastically behind in book production as compared to wealthy, core countries.

It is difficult to measure the amount of cultural content each country produces, but “web hosts” are a reasonable proxy measure because they let us make rough comparisons between countries over time. Just as books can be thick or thin, a web host can have a lot of content or very little.

While Europe and Asia produce the most books, the fastest rates of increase in book production are in Asia and Africa. Europe and Asia also have the most web hosts, but the fastest rates of growth in web hosts are in Asia and Latin America. Globally, the number of books being produced increased by 44 percent over the six-year period while the number of web hosts being established increased by over 600 percent. Weighting the publication of books and procurement of web hosts by population actually suggests that Africa and North America are publishing cultural content in book form at a greater rate than they are developing new web hosts. In Latin America and Asia, many countries are developing new web hosts at a significantly faster rate than they are publishing books. ((Download WIA Spreadsheet Book and Web Host Production))