This past week, Mozilla introduced a new open source initiative to document and explain the health of the Internet. The company has released The Internet Health Report which it says combines research from multiple sources and collects data on five key topics and offer a brief overview of each.
The key topics covered in the report are open innovation, digital inclusion, decentralization, privacy & security and web literacy.
A notable aspect of the report is the “Digital Inclusion” topic which highlights the statistics of people online. Interestingly, the report states that over 50% of the world is still offline.
The Report further pointed out that Internet access is skyrocketing in some regions, but poor and rural populations are least likely to benefit. Unless policies change, only 16% of people in under-developed countries will be online by 2020.
Mozilla reported another barrier being language as 52% of all websites are in English, while only 25% of the global population understands English. Also, about 58% of people in the world cannot afford an Internet connection and the lowest percentages of women online are in countries where mobile Internet costs the most.
Mozilla is now gathering feedback and choosing which metrics to revisit every year, on the basis of their five key topics.