| Abstract: |
The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) pro- vide Internet penetration statistics, which are collected from ocial
na- tional sources worldwide, and they are widely used to inform policy- makers and researchers about the expansion of digital technologies. Nev- ertheless, these statistics are derived with
methodologies, which are often opaque and inconsistent across countries. Even worse, regimes may have incentives to misreport such statistics. In this work, we make a rst attempt to evaluate the
consistency of the ITU/OECD Internet pene- tration statistics with an alternative indicator of Internet penetration, which can be measured with a consistent methodology across countries and
relies on public data.We compare, in particular, the ITU and OECD statistics with measurements of the used IPv4 address space across coun- tries and nd very high correlations ranging between
0.898 and 0.978 for all years between 2006 and 2010. We also observe that the level of con- sistency drops for less developed or less democratic countries. Besides, we show that measurements of
the used IPv4 address space can serve as a more timely Internet penetration indicator at sub-national granularity, using two large developing countries as case studies. |
