Somehow the news slipped by without us noticing, but some time in 1995 the one-billionth Internet user went online. There’s no central register of Internet users, so we don’t know who it was, or when they first logged on. But statistically, it was probably a 24-year-old woman in Shanghai.
In the time since then, the number has grown another 150 million or so, ball park. 36% of Internet users are now in Asia and 24% are in Europe. Only 23% of users are in North America, where it all started in 1969 when two computers — one in Los Angeles, the other in Palo Alto — were networked together.