The art of estimating how many are online throughout the world is an inexact one at best.
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 worldwide as of May 1999. And the number is 165 million. An Internet User represents a person with access to the Internet and is not specific to Internet Account holders. When the figure for Internet Account holders is the only information available, this figure is multiplied by a factor of 3 to give the number of Internet users.