"We are currently offline ..." - for many people this applies permanently
Photo:
Christoph Dernbach / dpa
Three decades after the concept for the World Wide Web was presented, eight million people in Germany still have no access to the Internet. That comes from statistics that the digital association Bitkom published on Thursday. According to this, 89 percent of people aged 16 and over in Germany use the Internet, a total of around 61 million people. Nevertheless, the company is still divided into online and offline, said Bitkom CEO Bernhard Rohleder.
Participation in digitization must be a matter of course for everyone in Germany, demanded Rohleder. »Access to the Internet is only the first step. People must also be able to move safely and confidently in the digital world. For this purpose, digital participation must be promoted more actively across the board of society. «The vast majority of humanity, however, benefit from the global pool of data, information and knowledge that is accessible via websites, said Rohleder.
The reason for the publication of the figures is that the scientist Tim Berners-Lee presented his concept for a World Wide Web with hyperlinked pages to a larger specialist public for the first time on August 6, 1991.
He published a corresponding proposal on the Usenet online debate forum.
The world's first website is a little older: the British physicist had already activated the info.cern.ch website at the CERN nuclear research center near Geneva on November 13, 1990.
Next to e-mail, the web is the most important service on the Internet.
Emails, tax returns and Christmas trees
According to Bitkom, more than four billion people are now globally networked. The number of websites has literally exploded in the past 30 years. "Today there are more than 1.8 billion websites - on a long-term average, around 60 million additional pages are put online every year," says Bitkom.
In order to illustrate what people use the Internet for, of which the World Wide Web is only a subset, Bitkom has also put together a series of figures.
According to this, for example, working people receive an average of 26 business e-mails per day and 28 million Germans complete their tax returns online.
However, only 29 percent of Internet users believe that their personal data is safe on the Internet.
And - for whatever reason this number is found in Bitkom's announcement - 13 percent of Germans have already bought a Christmas tree online.
mak / dpa