U.S Is In An Internet Decline

The United States is losing its clout in the global economy and the Internet as other countries develop faster growing markets, a financial analyst said Thursday at the Web 2.0 Summit.
In a speech on technology trends, Mary Meeker, managing director of Morgan Stanley's global technology research team, said the U.S. has become less relevant over the years to the global economy.

The U.S. share of the global gross domestic product has declined steadily since 1999 to 19% today from 22%. While this has been good news for other countries, it hasn't been a favorable trend for the U.S.

"The good news for the global economy is we're less relevant, the bad news is we're less relevant," Meeker said.

Going forward within the U.S., the country's current woes related to the subprime mortgage market "should not be underestimated" and it could have a serious impact on the U.S. GDP.

In terms of the Internet -- especially in technologies key to Web 2.0 success -- the fastest growth is in non-U.S. markets. For example, Germany leads the e-commerce market, China leads in online gaming, South Korea leads in broadband, Japan leads in mobile payments, the United Kingdom leads in online advertising, Brazil and South Korea lead in social networking, and the Philippines leads in micro-transactions via SMS.

America is not totally out of the picture. Online advertising is growing at a healthy clip in the U.S., growing 26% this year to 10% of the total ad market, or $21 billion, Meeker said. The total U.S. advertising market this year is expected to grow by 4%. By 2012, online advertising is expected to make up 17% of the total ad spend in the U.S.

As to the growing importance of new Internet companies, Meeker pointed to the number of social networks and other Web 2.0 properties that weren't in the top 10 rankings in terms of traffic in 2005, but are this year. Those companies include YouTube, No. 4; Live.com, No. 5; Facebook.com, No. 7; Orkut.com, No. 8; Wikipedia.org, No. 9; and Hi5.com, No. 10, according to Alexa Global Traffic Rankings.

http://www.informationweek.com/news/...leID=202404434

This is interesting, especially as since around '99-'00 a lot of companies started to target the international market place more and more over US based web surfers.

Its also interesting to see what countries around the world are being called 'leaders' of a specific field online.

Regards,

Lee

Ah, columnists always try to paint a negative, dramatic picture.

This is a great thing - the proliferation of the internet. Maybe the younglings don't remember the days when individual nations' telecom monopolies tightly controlled whatever primitive public networks existed. They were hugely expensive and didn't work well with other networks.

Then came the internet, which for years was a US-only phenomenon. The telcos dismissed it largely because they couldn't control it. but due to the ability of the internet protocols to adapt to just about any transmission medium, it won the Protocol Wars. And became the platform for our world wide web. And they lived happily ever after. Kinda.

What I'm saying is that naturally US share of internet business should decline as the internet becomes more and more pervasive. The internet would be far less useful for commerce if it remained a US playground.

Whether were really in a decline or not, seems like change can happen so fast and turn things around that worrying about it isn't going to help matters. Just have to cross those cyber bridges when you come to them.