The nature of the Internet, in particular its
anarchic beginnings with no central controlling authority and the consequent
lack of mandatory registration for individual users or computers, makes
it notoriously difficult to determine exactly how large it is. This
problem is further compounded by the fact that more IP addresses have been
allocated than are currently used; a single IP address can be used for
entire networks such as AOL or CompuServe; and that there may be multiple
users for a single computer or computer network. Nevertheless, there
have been some attempts to determine how many people use the Internet,
all of which show that the Internet is growing very big, very quickly.
For a well respected account of this growth, see Matthew K. Gray's, of
MIT, web page on "Internet
Statistics: Growth and Usage of the Web and the Internet". Alternatively,
Russ Haynal, an Internet consultant, instructor, author and speaker has
also prepared an "Internet Growth Statistics" web page which is current
to February 1999. You can click here
to view his page. A further source on Internet growth is Network
Wizards' "Internet Domain Name Survey". Click here
to view the latest such survey.