Google’s #freeandopen infographic shows what could be threatened by increased internet controls

In its campaign against granting more control over the internet’s governance to the United Nation’s ITU body Google has released this infographic.

The infographic shows the growth of the internet over the past forty years under current governance mechanisms.  Google is resisting what some are calling a “power grab” by the  International Telecommunication Union (ITU) @ITU a United Nations’ body which, in December, will discuss taking more control over the management of the internet.

Google has set up an online petition for users to campaign against the proposed changes.

Learn more about the UN/ITU and Google’s #freeandopen campaign.

Google is resisting the potential change; as is the European Union, which voted to condemn  what it sees as dangerous changes to the freedom of the internet.  The ITU denies the December meeting will lead to such controls.

The infographic shows how the internet has grown from just a handful of users in 1969 (as ARPAnet) to over two billion users in 2012 (about one third of the world’s population).

According to the data, the internet helps create over 143,000 businesses in developing nations each year and has added US$1.67 trillion to the world’s economy.

We send over 89 billion business emails each day and share 325 million photos on social networking sites.  YouTube receives over 72 hours of video each minute and there are 23 million Wikipedia articles available in 280 languages.

Some 90% of the world’s population is covered by mobile data networks and 2 million smartphones are activated every day.  Skype handles 25% of all international calls, and most impressively;

There are over 1,000,000,000,000 (one trillion) web pages online.