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Regulating content on the Internet: A new technological perspective
The Changing Nature of Internet Traffic
The nature of Internet traffic has changed significantly since 1999, both in volume and kind. In 1999 the major activity in which Canadians engaged on the Internet was e-mail communication as well as information gathering through use of static Web sites. Today, Canadians are increasingly turning to the Internet as a source of communication, news, entertainment, and services.
Conversational & Social Media Sites
A new category of "conversational & social media" Web site — on which users are able to express themselves creatively, share content, and form social communities — has been gaining increasing importance over the last few years. The trend towards the use of social media sites has resulted in a significant shift from the predominance of traditional, professionally-produced content to an explosion of user-generated multimedia content. The table below indicates the wide range of activities in which Canadians are engaged on the Web.
| Category of Web Site | % Reach | Total Unique Visitors (000) |
Total Minutes (MM) |
Total Pages Viewed (MM) |
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Corporate Presence | 99.3 | 23,596 | 22,235 | 23,918 |
| 2 | Services | 98,3 | 23 372 | 16 848 | 18 054 |
| 3 | Portails | 96.9 | 23,026 | 16,084 | 12,666 |
| 4 | Search/Navigation | 94.6 | 22,487 | 1,042 | 3,618 |
| 5 | Entertainment | 92.8 | 22,047 | 5,342 | 7,598 |
| 6 | Retail | 90.7 | 21,564 | 2,598 | 5,188 |
| 7 | Directories/Resources | 88.0 | 20,924 | 2,027 | 4,177 |
| 8 | Conversational Media Social Networking Blogs |
86.4 85.0 63.3 |
20,545 20,195 15,039 |
7,421 7,321 339 |
16,185 15,938 671 |
| 9 | 84.4 | 20,066 | 4,287 | 5,481 | |
| 10 | News/Information | 83.0 | 19,732 | 1,466 | 2,222 |
| 11 | Multimedia | 81.3 | 19,318 | 2,475 | 3,132 |
| 12 | Business/Finance | 78.4 | 18,624 | 1,247 | 2,913 |
| 13 | Downloads | 77.4 | 18,400 | 400 | 614 |
| 14 | Technology | 76.0 | 18,062 | 361 | 454 |
| 15 | General News | 73.1 | 17,375 | 949 | 1,422 |
| 16 | Community | 72.4 | 17,205 | 958 | 1,540 |
| 17 | Instant Messengers | 68.9 | 16,367 | 8,391 | 569 |
| 18 | Reference | 66.7 | 15,854 | 370 | 472 |
| 19 | Photos | 66.6 | 15,825 | 1,083 | 4,299 |
| 20 | Banking | 65.0 | 15,446 | 903 | 2,321 |
Source : comScore Canada
A number of sources (for example, Alexa.com, Ranking.com, MiniRank.com, and comScore Canada) rank the popularity of Web sites, each using a different methodology. We found the methodology used by comScore Canada, which not only tracks the number of visitors to a Web site, but identifies unique visitors, total minutes spent by each visitor on the site, and total pages viewed, to be the most useful and appropriate for our purposes. We believe that, with some caveats, it gives a good picture of Canadian Web surfing habits. Regardless of whose methodology is used, certain sites consistently appear in the top 20 most popular sites visited by Canadians. For example, Google sites (including Google.ca, Google.com, and YouTube), are consistently at or very near the top, as are Microsoft sites such as msn.ca, msn.com, Facebook, and Live.com. Consistently highly ranked Canadian sites include Canoe.ca, Theweathernetwork.com, CTV, CBC, and the TD Bank Financial Group.
Exponential Growth in Web Hosts and Web Sites
In 1999 there were approximately 100 million Web hosts (servers providing Web content) in the world. Today, there are at least five times as many Web hosts, with over 500 million servers most of which host multiple Web sites. The following chart shows the growth in Web hosts between 1994 and 2007.
Estimates are that there were between 15 billion and 30 billion Web sites online in 2007. 14 Web sites, on average, are significantly larger than in 1999, many (for example, the sites of news and entertainment organizations, universities and research organizations, and major corporations) consisting of tens of thousands or even millions of pages. Most of these pages no longer consist of static content, but are dynamically generated from data sources. Not only do the contents of these pages change from minute-to-minute, day-to-day or hour-to-hour, but they may be customized to appear different to different users, based either on user role or user preferences.
Real-Time Content Generation
A significant amount of Internet content is generated in "real-time". This includes text content (e.g., chat, instant messaging, blogs), one-to-one or one-to-many audio and video conferencing and IP telephony (e.g., Skype), and on-line collaboration and education (e.g., virtual classrooms, online seminars and meetings). Furthermore, on many sites user-generated content (text, photos, video) appears instantly on social media sites such as YouTube, Facebook, Flickr and FYI Canada, without being reviewed. (Most of these sites have adopted a version of a "notice and takedown" system for dealing with problem content.)
Web and Email are now Only a Small Percentage of Internet Traffic
As network technologies converge, more and more of the entertainment and communications media that Canadians have traditionally used are moving to the Internet. While Web (HTTP) and email were the primary sources of data exchanged over the Internet in 1999, today they form only a small fraction of the total data exchanged over the Internet, accounting for approximately one-fifth of Internet data traffic. Other applications, including VOIP applications such asC Skype and commercial VOIP services, music downloading such as iTunes, IPTV services, and peer-to-peer file sharing account for the majority of Internet traffic. The chart below illustrates the current breakdown of types of Internet traffic, with projections to 2011.
Source: Cisco White Paper, The Exabyte Era, Updated January 14, 2008
14 Pandia Search Engine News, "The Size of the World Wide Web" http://www.pandia.com/sew/383-websize.html. Note that counting Web sites is difficult for a number of reasons. Only a percentage of Web sites are indexed, even by the largest search engines, and these companies no longer share information on how many sites they have indexed. The definition of a site, is ambiguous. For example, Google's Blogger blog service hosts a huge number of blogs, each of which is, in essence, a separate site. And many organizations have corporate intranet sites, that are not visible to the outside world.
