According to a recent report by The Boston Consulting Group (BCG), the United Kingdom Internet Industry contributed £100 billion to the economy, in 2009. This represents 7.2% of U.K. GDP and is more than the construction, transport and utilities industries.

The report indicates that this share is likely to grow to about 10% of GDP by 2015.

Around 60% of this total is represented by “consumption”,  the amount that Internet users spend on online shopping and on the cost of their connections, hardware devices and software, required to access the Internet. The rest comes from investment in the United Kingdom’s Internet infrastructure, government IT spending, and net exports.

More than 19 million households have an internet connection

More than 19 million households have an Internet connection, which represents a 73% market share. Plus, broadband penetration has more than doubled since 2005.

U.K. users spent the equivalent of an entire 24-hour day on the Internet in April, an increase of 65% in just three years. Almost one third of all Internet users have accessed the Internet on their mobile handset, up from 23% in 2009. That share rises to 44% among users aged 16 to 24.

£50 billion spent on online purchases

The number of people who bought goods or services online in the past year, totalled 31 million, or 62% of the U.K. Population. In total, they spent £50 billion on goods, services and travel.

The report also found that the U.K. Internet economy employs and estimated 250,000 people and has annual revenue of £50 billion.

“The Internet is pervasive in the U.K. economy today, more so than in most advanced countries,” said Paul Zwillenberg, partner with BCG in London.

“Whether they are driving international expansion, improving their interactions with customers or the efficiency of their supply chains, U.K. companies are increasingly embracing the Internet’s potential. Several industries, including media, travel, insurance, and fashion, are being transformed by it.”

The report was commissioned by Google UK but was researched and written independently by BCG.

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Newspaper publishers will now be able to set a limit on the number of free news articles people can read through Google, the company has announced.

The concession follows claims from some media companies that the search engine is profiting from online news pages.

Under the First Click Free programme, publishers can now prevent unrestricted access to subscription websites. Users who click on more than five articles in a day may be routed to payment or registration pages.

Story from BBC NEWS:

Published: 2009/12/02 00:46:39 GMT

The internet regulator has approved plans to allow non-Latin-script web addresses, in a move that is set to transform the online world. The board of Icann voted at its annual meeting in Seoul to allow domain names in Arabic, Chinese and other scripts.

More than half of the 1.6 billion people who use the internet speak languages with non-Latin scripts.

It is being described as the biggest change to the way the internet works since it was created 40 years ago. The first Internationalised Domain Names (IDNs) could be in use next year. Plans for IDNs were first approved at a meeting in June 2008, but testing of the system has been going on for two years.

Technical upheaval

The move paves the way for the internet’s Domain Name System (DNS) to be changed so it can recognise and translate non-Latin characters. The DNS acts like a phonebook, turning easily understood domain names into strings of computer-readable numbers, known as Internet Protocol (IP) addresses.

“This change is very much necessary for not only half the world’s internet users today but more than half, probably, of the future users as the internet continues to spread ” Rod Beckstrom President of Icann

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) said the “fantastically complicated technical feature” allowing IDNs would represent the “biggest change” to the coding that underlies the internet since it was invented four decades ago.

BBC technology correspondent Mark Gregory says in the early days of the internet, language posed no problem, as most web-surfers spoke English and those that did not usually wrote in languages based on the Latin alphabet. But this is no longer true, adds our correspondent.

New system to be up and running by middle of next year

Icann said it would accept the first applications for IDNs by 16 November, with the first up and running by “mid-2010″. It is likely the majority of early non-Latin net addresses to be approved will be in Chinese and Arabic script, followed by Russian. Some countries, such as China and Thailand, have already introduced workarounds that allow computer users to enter web addresses in their own language. However, these were not internationally approved and do not work on all computers.

Autonomy

Our correspondent says the point of the Icann vote was to create a universal internet address code that will work in any language and every place so all the world’s computers can connect with each other. “Of the 1.6 billion internet users today worldwide, more than half use languages that have scripts that are not Latin-based,” said Icann president and CEO Rod Beckstrom earlier this week. “So this change is very much necessary for not only half the world’s internet users today but more than half, probably, of the future users as the internet continues to spread.”

Icann, set up by the US government, was founded in 1998 to oversee the development of the net. Last month, after years of criticism, the US government eased its control over the non-profit body. It signed a new agreement that gave Icann autonomy for the first time. The agreement came into effect on 1 October and puts it under the scrutiny of the global “internet community”.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/technology/8333194.stm
Published: 2009/10/30 05:13:22 GMT

A study of the global state of broadband has put the UK 25th out of 66 countries in terms of the quality of its networks.

The research for Cisco found that countries such as Latvia and Bulgaria were better prepared than the UK for next-generation net applications.

The UK was listed among countries whose broadband is “meeting needs for today”.

Korea and Japan continue to dominate the league table, largely due to their commitment to fast networks.

LEADERS IN BROADBAND QUALITY      

South Korea

Japan

Hong Kong

Sweden

Switzerland

Netherlands

Singapore

Luxembourg

Denmark

Norway

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/technology/8282839.stm

Published: 2009/10/01 00:20:06 GMT

Google has a 60% share of search queries in the U.S., but that number is 67% worldwide, according to ComScore. In many top and growing internet countries, including Germany, Canada, Brazil, Turkey and Italy, Google has more than 80% of the search market.

So, how are the search wars playing out abroad?

Very well for Google, as the following international data from ComScore show. Note that this data does not include China, where Baidu is dominant and Google is frequently blocked by government censors.

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