One Internet, Multiple Economies
More than 6.1 billion people are now online. The ITU’s latest full-year estimate placed 6.0 billion online at the end of 2025, about 74 percent of the world’s population, while 2.2 billion remained offline.
Mobile broadband reaches...
Internet access creates economic possibility, but connectivity alone does not determine what an economy does with it. The larger transition begins when households and businesses use that connectivity for transactions. E-commerce turns communications infrastructure into economic participation by creating...
A new internet market opens. Entrepreneurs enter quickly, capital follows, and no one is certain which company – or technology – will prevail. Then the field narrows. Firms disappear or are acquired while a handful achieve meaningful scale. Search,...
Internet regulation is increasingly a form of economic governance. It shapes safety, rights, and sovereignty while also influencing how markets function and where economic value accrues. The internet no longer sits beside the economy as a discrete communications sector....
A mobile signal reaching a village in Tanzania, fiber running into a factory in northern Mexico, and a high-capacity network linking production sites in the Netherlands all count as connectivity. Technically, they belong to the same category. Economically, they...
Bitcoin is usually presented as a challenge to conventional money. A more useful way to understand it may be as an experiment taking place inside the conventional monetary system. Its protocol determines how new coins enter circulation and ultimately...
Artificial intelligence is driving the current surge in data-center construction, but the economic stakes extend well beyond AI itself. These facilities create productive computing capacity that supports the broader digital economy, enabling regions with sufficient infrastructure to attract investment,...
While the internet is not a pure utility, it now functions as one across modern economic life. ICT has become embedded in households and institutions to the point that traditional economics applies more directly than when connectivity was still...
The first worker displaced by a robot may never receive a termination notice. A warehouse employee leaves or a cleaner retires, and the employer simply does not replace the position. Part of the workload moves to a machine. The...
A household can now divide its financial life across institutions that once performed many of the same monetary functions. Wages may still arrive through the banking system, while savings or cross-border transfers increasingly move through cryptocurrencies. The dollar continues...