Four years ago, the United Nations predicted that more than half of the global population would be connected to the internet by 2017, buoyed in part by “the fastest growing technology in human history”: mobile broadband. The world missed the mark. Now the UN expects to achieve that goal by the end of 2019, and that still leaves an estimated 3.8 billion people offline.

What happened? Though global access to the internet grew between 2002 and 2016, the rate of growth has slowed in the past two years, according to an analysis from the Web Foundation that was first reported by The Guardian.

It's important to be clear that slower growth doesn't mean people aren't still gaining access. You could have the same number of people get connected every year, and the percentage growth rate would drop. What surprised the Web Foundation team, led by research director Dhanaraj Thakur, was how much the gains have slowed: The connected population grew by 19 percent in 2007; last year it grew by less than 6 percent. Thakur is still studying exactly what accounts for the slowdown.

"If the growth rate is slowing down, that’s very worrying, because when will that next 4 billion people get online? It’s going to take longer for that to happen, and that’s a big problem," he says, pointing to the economic and social opportunities that are cut off from those without access to the internet.

But the challenges of universal access, or even reaching the UN’s goal of 50 percent, go beyond the recent slowdown in growth rate. Hidden in the broad number of people the UN already considers to be online is a bleaker picture, one in which even that access is severely limited by factors both economic and cultural.

The International Telecommunications Union, the UN agency tasked with getting the world connected, counts a person as using the internet if they managed to get online at least once in the last three months. That, some advocates say, shouldn’t count as meaningful access. “The economic benefits of having internet access don’t kick in or become real until you are using the internet consistently,” says Ellery Biddle, director at Global Voices Advox, an online network dedicated to free speech and internet access issues. “I don’t think using it once every three months would have much of a benefit.”

The UN’s measurement has other weaknesses, too. “When you talk about getting online, it’s not that simple. Not everybody is experiencing the internet in the same way, and that broad metric hides that fact,” Thakur says. “In some countries, there is very fast connectivity. In others you might have a spotty 3G connection that goes in and out, so what you can do with it is really restricted. This definition does not capture that.”

“It’s not geography, it’s not mountain ranges, it’s lack of political power in a lot of cases that’s determining access.”

Peter Micek, Access Now

And while the UN has touted mobile broadband as a key instrument for achieving universal access, that technology remains out of reach for many around the world due to cost. In a survey of 60 low- and middle-income countries, the Web Foundation found that only 24 offered affordable mobile plans (costing less than 2 percent of the national average monthly income) at the end of last year.

Even when infrastructure is in place, high rates can persist if telecommunications companies have a monopoly, or if they depend on foreign companies to manage their networks, which costs a lot of money. Some countries have made good use of Universal Service Funds, which are created by charging fees to telcos, to subsidize lower-income access to the internet, but others leave the money on the table.

“A lot of the easy work has happened, in terms of wiring up cities and getting developed nations online. I think we’re getting to those obstacles that are very much tied in with a lot of the other economic and cultural challenges that we face,” says Peter Micek, lead counsel for the advocacy group Access Now and co-chair of the Gender Digital Divide working group at the IEEE's Internet Initiative. “It’s not geography, it’s not mountain ranges, it’s lack of political power in a lot of cases that’s determining access.”


For many women around the world, especially, lack of political power is an entrenched reality. And it exacerbates other issues like cost when it comes to using the internet. Both Thakur and Micek note that the spread of internet access has slowed at the same time that the gender divide in access has grown—and that this is not coincidental. According to the ITU, the worldwide digital gender gap has grown from 11 percent in 2013 to 11.6 percent last year. While most regions improved in that time, Africa's gap widened to 25 percent; across all least-developed countries, the gap is now 32.9 percent.

Here, too, the possibilities unlocked by mobile broadband technology have run into social and economic obstacles on the ground. A recent report from GSMA, a trade group for mobile operators, estimated that women in low- and middle-income countries are, on average, 10 percent less likely to own a mobile phone than men, and 26 percent less likely to use mobile internet. “For women, it is problematic if they depend on a device that is controlled by a man in their family,” says Micek, who is a huge proponent of policies that directly address the gender gap, such as providing public access hubs in schools and libraries.

Even when they own phones, though, women in many developing countries are still less likely than men to use the internet. The Web Foundation's research has found that affordability and digital literacy are the two main barriers to access. Lower levels of education more generally among women and girls in these places is also a factor.

“We did surveys in 10 cities in low-income countries. Men were 50 percent more likely to be using the internet,” says Thakur. “That’s because of patriarchal issues as well as cost issues. But it’s all related, right? Because women unfortunately make less than men.”

Any solution requires a recognition of the gender gap in global internet access, and the array of forces that can cause and compound the problem. “Costa Rica is a good example of what the government can do to help improve connectivity for particularly low-income people and women,” says Thakur. Costa Rica went from having 28.4 percent of the population using the internet in 2007 to 66 percent in 2016, according to ITU. That year, a higher proportion of women were using the internet than men, 66.3 percent to 65.7.

“They provide access to low-income households," Thakur adds. "Many low-income households in Latin America and the Caribbean are single-parent houses headed by a woman, so when that program in Costa Rica subsidizes access to the household, it benefits women in particular.”

Thakur points to Ghana as an example of a nation trying to improve in a region where the internet gender gap is highest. Ghana, he says, uses its Universal Access Funds not only to subsidize the cost of getting online, but also to provide training, such as classes that teach people how to use a browser or download an app. Efforts like this are helpful for closing the skills gap that keeps some off the internet, but as the Web Foundation's research has shown, they only work if they are implemented consistently and in combination with policies like infrastructure sharing.

Private tech companies have been working to expand internet access, too. But more recently their experiences in countries like Myanmar and the Philippines have been held up as cautionary tales. Even when things go well, Global Voices' Biddle warns, initiatives like Facebook's and Google's Project Loon may be more flash than substance. "I worry that these huge kinds of efforts coming from California are a little bit of a distraction, and they take up a certain amount of time and energy from regulators," she notes. At the same time, Facebook has also launched programs like the Telecom Infra Project, to support shared infrastructure and open-source design within the industry.


The things that work are not necessarily sexy. What's needed is cables, tax incentives, shared infrastructure, and education. “We know there are certain things that will work,” says Thakur. “Policies that will promote infrastructure sharing, for one.” He is also studying the different download speeds of developing nations, to elucidate how even when there is access, it's not necessarily robust or reliable.

And that’s the thing about broad numbers on global internet access: Hiding inside them are stories of individual lives and smaller divides. The global rate of growth is slowing, yes, but the reality is even worse. And that means billions of people, already some of the most vulnerable in the world among them, are being left behind.

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Emily Dreyfuss is a senior writer at WIRED, covering technology’s impact on society. She was a 2018 Nieman-Berkman Klein Fellow in Journalism Innovation at Harvard University, and previously worked at CNET as a senior editor. She cut her teeth in newspapers in Connecticut after graduating from Wesleyan University with a... Read more