Internet penetration stalls out at 60% worldwide

A report from KPCB this week suggests that internet penetration worldwide is stalling out at around 60%. This means that 6 out of every 10 people around the world have access to the internet – or choose to make use of it. Most of the world's top 15 countries ranked by number of internet users have well over 50% penetration of population, but that's just about as good as it's going to get, according to year-over-year growth rates. People are just being born too fast for internet availability to keep up, clearly.

Here you'll find the established "Big" Internet Markets at 6% growth in 2014 with a +7% growth rate year over year. These "Big" Internet Markets include China, USA, Japan, Russia, and Brazil. A year-over-year growth rate of 7% – or lower, for most countries, suggests that major growth is over.

Or at least stalled in a big way.

Spain, Canada, Germany, and Japan are all at a 0% growth rate, while France has actually fallen by a percentage point.

The United States has one of the most impressive combinations of number of internet users and population penetration at 269 million, that making up 84% of our total population.

The only nations with growth in internet population penetration areRussia, the United Kingdom, and Egypt. Every other nation on this list has either stalled out or has begun to fall.

The information you're seeing here comes from the KPCB 2015 Internet Trends report. This information comes from the United Nations Telecommunications Union, US Census Bureau for most nations.

Internet user data for China comes from CNNIC, India data comes from IAMAI, Iran info comes from the Islamic Republic News Agency, citing data released by the National Internet Development Center, and Indonesia information comes from APJII / eMarketer.

Internet data above is representative of users as of mid-year 2014. Information about 2015 will be available in Q2 2016.

The full report can be found at KPCB on page 193 of 197 this week.