Existing representations of the Internet do not provide information on why countries have a bigger Internet presence (e.g., Internet Service Providers) than others. In this paper we evaluated 4 geo-economical parameters (area, population, GDP and GDP per capita) of 195 world's countries and continents, looking for clues of why some areas or countries have developed more than others. We use correlation studies to analyse which geo-economical variable leads to bigger development in the Internet infrastructure per continent and per country, and cartograms to represent the growth of the Internet infrastructure around the world, in a sequence of 24 years. Such representations lead to observations of patterns and outliers in such development.
Video 1: colors represent GDP. The darker, the richest.
In the video we can see the beginning of the Internet, with total dominance from the US, the expansion to Europe, and later to other continents. With the color schema representing GDP, it is possible to identify a high correlation with GDP, since the richest countries are developing their network most. In Europe and Asia, the correlation is not very strong.
Video 2: colors represent Population. The darker, the most populated.
With the color schema representing Population, it is possible to identify, in general, not very high correlation with the growth of number of ASes. Interesting examples in Europe, such as Ukraine and Poland, with a very large number of ASes; also, China and India have smaller networks when comparing to other large countries, such as US.