The second phase, from 1987 until 1992, saw the opening of the Internet to the general public. During this time, many commercial service providers opened gateways to the net. The third phase, from 1992 to 1996, began with the release of the HTTP protocol and the graphical browsers which allowed people to explore hyperlinked documents on the web. What characterizes the fourth phase is that the internet and the web are becoming part of a pervasive networked computing environment as we move towards a state where we will have constant access from any location. Estimates of the number of net users vary widely, but the clear trend is that there will be continued growth in internet and web use for the foreseeable future.
Surveys abound, using all sorts of measurement parameters.
However, from observing many of the published surveys over the last two years, here is an 'educated guess' as to how many are online as of November 2000. And the number is 407.1 million. There are some fascinating trends in this growth. Millions more children will be coming online from both home and school. As more Internet users gain access to the WWW and discover the ease with which HTML can be used to create WWW documents, thousands of new WWW sites come online each day.