
Six billion people are online, but the internet is still not equally global
About three quarters of humanity, roughly six billion people, is now plugged into the global web. In one sense, this is a real triumph for the globalists, technocrats, telecom builders, undersea cables, cell towers, and cheap smartphones that spent decades pulling the planet online. But behind the optimistic charts, the old structure of inequality is still there: in high-income countries, internet access is almost universal, around 94%, while in low-income countries it is still only about 23%. So the internet has become global, but not evenly global. For billions of people on the periphery, access to the digital world still depends on the same basic things: electricity, infrastructure, money, devices, and enough stability for “being online” to matter in everyday life.