The Internet Value Chain

THE INTERNET VALUE CHAIN
Introduction
The public internet is 25 years old. In that time it has
evolved from ‘surfing the World Wide Web’ to a complex
ecosystem of content and services, hosted on
approximately 80 million servers and delivered through
an intricate network of cables, mobile networks, and
satellites. As almost half of the people on the planet get
online, the endless drive to innovate leads to a continuous
evolution of new uses for the internet—from booking a
room in a stranger's house, to live-broadcasting an event
to the world from your smartphone, to remotely
monitoring a sleeping child. Simultaneously abstract yet
pervasive in our everyday lives, it is unsurprising that
debates about the internet continue to escalate, including
about how much individuals should be able to protect
their personal details, to what extent people should be
able to filter out unwanted content, and how the internet
should be funded.
A combination of availability and affordability of
internet connectivity, content and services, and devices
has led to an increasingly connected world (see figure 1).
By the end of 2015, 3.2 billion people globally—43 per
cent of the world’s population—were estimated to be
online. This is nearly 1.2 billion people more than when
the last internet value chain paper was written in 2010.
In other words, since then an average of 633,000
people have gone online for the first time every day
over the past five years.
Figure 1
Global internet users and penetration rate
4,000
43%
40%
3,500
38%
+48%
35%
3,174
3,000
32%
2,937
Million users
2,500
2,000
1,500
16%
17%
20%
1,365
23%
1,561
25%
1,751
29%
2,019
2,224
2,705
2,494
1,000
500
0
147
70
36
16
4%
2%
1%
0%
1995 1996 1997 1998
13% 1,151
11% 1,024
9%
361 9%
817
719
248
587
6% 513
4%
1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015
Internet users (million)
Penetration rate (%)
Sources: International Telecommunication Union, GSMA; A.T. Kearney analysis
9