"The Commission also reckons that some areas such as online advertising will actually benefit from the downturn because advertisers will move online and away from traditional media."

Someone might want to tell AOL ... Maybe it'll increase their revenue if they know ;-)

Shouldn't that me Mb/sec (bits not bytes)?

Its only essential for people who work in IT , homeworkers and the socially stunted who substitute "friends" on Mybook or Facespace for real life friendships. For everyone else its like TV - a nice-to-have but quite easy to live without. And if you're doing long hours and working hard to earn money then you probably have better ways to spend your free time than wasting your time sitting in front of a computer.

I work in IT but lost internet access when we moved house for a couple of weeks. Can't say it bothered me unduly. I'd have been more upset if the TV had stopped working frankly.

We want more people off the Internet! The report says that most those who have not been online were old. poor, or stupid - I suggest the exact opposite. Those who have never been online are smarter and richer (in a philosophical sense) than all the sods who waste their lives online commenting on news stories and hiding behind false identities while they spew their drivel all over the place.

Is that report sure? The last time I checked it was Mb/sec, not MB/sec.

But then again... this is after all continental Europe where 22 Mb/sec on ADSL2+ is not unheard of.

"but, my dear, I simply can't live without my Range Rover - I don't know how you manage with that bicycle (and with only the one, too)".

Really, this is the most sniffy, superior piece I've read in a long time. Calling uptake in internet usage an improvement. Would the same be said about car usage? - maybe in the unenlightened times of 50 years ago!! Hmmm. The tone is similar to what you hear about "the olden days" when people only had black and white TV, or rationing, or steamships as the only way to get from continent A to continent B.

There are lots of people (incl. my mum) who live full and happy lives without internet access. There are just as many - probably even more, who don't have a phone line to hang their ADSL off. Are they deprived? are they unhappy with their lot? are they somehow less important, or significant because of this?

Given that in large parts of Europe, away from urban centres, a basic, slow and intermittent ADSL connection will cost you over £300++/year, ON TOP of a phone line rental - a better question might be: do most people who actually pay the bill, get value for money from all this internet hype?

They don't have to use the internet if they don't want to, just like I don't have to watch Big Brother or endless sport on TV.

So this means my comments here are only read by 66.7% of all Europeans?!

Hardly worth the trouble.

I'm from Europe and I have never used the internet, I wouldn't even know how to use it. What's it for anyway? Does it run on batteries? And can you post silly comments with it?

So the solution is obviously to tax all existing broadband to pay for running gigabit fibre to some goat herd in the Pyrenees.

Now if you could only find a large national telecoms provider willing to undertake a task of such benefit to the community, and a politician courageous enough to give them billions of euro to do it.

That'll be one group who aren't losing sleep over the Windows 7 ballot box then...

Bloody good news!

Do you really want these people on the internet? They're the type that plug in an unprotected Win box and leave it there to join a bot farm.

Satire? On The Register? Now I've seen everything...

Now, draw up a chair and I'll tell you young folk all about the times when we were hanging out all cool in alt.fan.warlord when the WebTV storm hit. The old, the poor and the stupid right up there in your face all day, every day, with but a brief respite while they slept...

How much did this study cost, who authorised it, what truly useful knowledge did it produce and what's a European anyway

Does the EC's definition include Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Turkey etc - I suspect not. Yet according to the Council of Europe and the OSCE those countries and many more beside lie within their bailiwick, although few non Europeans would agree with that assessment . And what about Albania, Bosnia, Serbia which most non Europeans would regard as being European, I suspect the EC has excluded them on the basis that they are non EU members, but they probably included Switzerland and Noway which are also non-EU members.

The EU and its Commissioners are just a bunch of spendthrift purveyors of mistruths.

"Now, draw up a chair and I'll tell you young folk all about the times when we were hanging out all cool in alt.fan.warlord when the WebTV storm hit. The old, the poor and the stupid right up there in your face all day, every day, with but a brief respite while they slept.."

::snort::

Back in the net.* days, we were thinking we might be on the edge of a major revolution ... There was no sleep, someone was awake, somewhere. Then TheWELL, BIX, Delphi, and later AOL (nee. Qlink) happened.

You alt.* folks were the beginning of the end ...

( Apologies to Russ, see: http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/writing/rant.html )