Sites that provide statistics on worldwide Internet access and use (many sites and sources are listed on dmoz):
- World population is 6.45 billion today according to World Gazetteer; it was 6.3 billion in 2002 according to the UN.
- Global Reach says 729M have access (March 2004).
- Internet World Stats says 785M (March 2004).
- Nua said 606M (Sept. 2002).
A claim that “roughly” or “about” 10% of the world’s people have Internet access seems safe. (We have no category for “intro” or “frontmatter”, it seems. Probably a good idea.)