Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Photo credit: CampusPartyBrazil http://flic.kr/p/9bjSyQ
The background
Sweden leads the world in terms of technological access to the web, availability of online content and social impact of the Internet, according to the the 2012 Web Index (PDF), a first-of-its-kind report. The Index is the work of the non-profit World Wide Web Foundation, led by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the English computer scientist credited with inventing the web in 1989. The United States came second with the United Kingdom coming in third. Six of the top 10 countries are European.
The study is considered a ground-breaking look not only at the technology of the web but also measuring how well a country is allowing its citizens to share information online and ultimately impact society, pointed out The Daily Mail. The Index’s researchers studied 61 developed and developing nations, offering the “first multidimensional measure of the Web’s growth, utility and impact.” Nepal, Cameroon and Mali were the bottom three.
The point of this report, per Berners-Lee
“By shining a light on the barriers to the web for everyone, the Index is a powerful tool that will empower individuals, government and organisations to improve their societies,” Berners-Lee told the BBC. “The high price of connectivity is stopping billions of people from achieving their rights to knowledge and participation. Costs have got to come down dramatically,” Berners-Lee said about the disparity in the availability of Internet access. “The Web is a global conversation. Growing suppression of free speech, both online and offline, is possibly the single biggest challenge to the future of the Web,” he added.
The web now has around 3.4 billion users worldwide. Less than one in three people use the Internet across the globe, with only one in six people in Africa using it.
How the countries and ranked
Wired.co.uk spelled out exactly how the index – initially funded by Google – measures and ranks three key attributes of the web in different countries: “These are: ‘web readiness’, which is the quality and extent of communications infrastructure; ‘web use’, which looks at the percentage of individuals online and the quantity and quality of content available to users in their language; and ‘the impact of the web’, which is broken down into political, social and economic.” Data was garnered from a wide range of providers including the ITU, the World Bank, World Economic Forum, Reporters without Borders, Wikipedia and Freedom House. The Web Foundation “hopes that the data will help decision-makers across the public and private sectors and NGOs understand how to allocate resources and where improvements are needed,” reported Wired.co.uk.
Why Sweden is the champion of the world
Jon Yeomans of ZDNet.com spelled out just how Sweden edged out the US to claim top spot: “Sweden scored highly for ‘impact of the web’, though it did less well in having a high quantity of content available to its population. The US, in second place, did well in terms of web content, but ranked lower for social, economic and political impact, and in infrastructure.” And the writer underlined how the UK performed so well: “The UK was praised for having faster average broadband speeds than the US and ‘a strong performance in web content’. ‘The scale and quality of available content has been boosted by various public-sector initiatives,’ the report noted, possibly reflecting the UK government’s push to put more services online.”
