World Wide Web Foundation Report

• 12 Nov 2018

World Wide Web Foundation recently released a report on Internet Accessibility and Affordability.

• World Wide Web Foundation is established by Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the Internet.
• The WWW Foundation’s study is based on purchasing power, comparing the price of 1GB of data against average household income.

Major Findings of Report

• The report has found a sharp decline in the growth of Internet access across the globe due to a dip in affordability.
• However, India has shown the reverse trend in Internet accessibility and affordability because of the decrease in prices.
• The report mentions healthy market competition, growth in infrastructure, good policymaking and the role played by TRAI (which has created an open-access system to measure the quality of service) as factors responsible for India’s growth.
• India also had an advantage over the developed countries because it had fewer legacy systems (old computer systems) to write off and could tap directly into the mobile internet boom.
• Global Digital Divide
  • Despite the global communications boom, one out of every two humans is still offline.
  • The majority of the people with no internet connection are in nations that are either developing or small and are mostly females..
  • Worldwide, 2.3 billion people live in a country where a 1GB mobile broadband plan is unaffordable for those earning the average income.
  • This digital divide undermines opportunities for wider socio-economic development.

Inclusive Internet Index

• The Inclusive Internet Index is commissioned by Facebook and conducted by The Economist Intelligence Unit (Part of the UK based The Economist Group).
• It seeks to measure the extent to which the Internet is not only accessible and affordable but also “relevant to all, allowing usage that enables positive social and economic outcomes at individual and group level.”
• India was ranked 47th out of 86 countries in Inclusive Internet Index in 2018.