But it was the creation of the world wide web in that revolutionized our history of communication. The inventor of the world wide web was the English scientist Tim Berners-Lee who created a system to share information through a network of computers. This chart shows the share and number of people that are using the Internet, which in these statistics refers to all those who have used the Internet in the last 3 months. The chart starts in , still one year before Berners-Lee released the first web browser and before the very first website was online the site of CERN, which is still online. At that time very few computers around the world were connected to a network; estimates for suggest that only half of a percent of the world population were online. As the chart shows, this started to change in the s, at least in some parts of the world: By the year almost half of the population in the US was accessing information through the internet. At the other end of the spectrum, there are still countries where almost nothing has changed since

Below is a sortable list of countries by number of Internet users , for Internet users are defined as persons who accessed the Internet in the last 12 months from any device, including mobile phones. Estimates are derived either from household surveys or from Internet subscription data. All United Nations member states are included, except North Korea , whose number of internet users is estimated at a few thousand.

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