Google chairman Eric Schmidt believes everyone on Earth will have an online presence by the end of this decade, prompting discussion of the likelihood of this on Google+.
Schmidt said on his Google+ page: “For every person online, there are two who are not. By the end of the decade, everyone on Earth will be connected.”
Currently two billion of the world’s population of more than seven billion people are online, less than two-thirds of the total.
The comment elicited a strong response from the online community, causing 521 people to “ID” the post and 71 to share it.
In a follow-up post Schmidt seemed to retract the original idea, suggesting only five billion people would be online by 2020.
“Think about how great the internet is with 2B users,” he wrote. “Now think about how amazing it will be when 5B come online in a decade.”
For Schmidt’s vision to become a reality a number of continents will need to drastically increase internet penetration and usage. The Middle East and Africa respectively have just 3.7 per cent and 7 per cent internet usage, according to Internet World Stats.
Apart from Australia, North America and Europe, all the other regions of the world are below 50 per cent internet penetration.
