More people online, UN says

A new report from a United Nations agency says that 47 percent of the world's people now use the internet - an increase from just one year ago, when the same agency estimated that just more than 43 percent of the global population were internet users.

However, the study, released Tuesday by the International Telecommunications Union, also discovered serious geographic and economic disparities in who uses the internet.

The 2016 Measuring the Information Society Report found that 79.1 percent of Europeans were internet users, for example, the highest of any geographic region in the world, followed by 66.6 percent of people in the Americas and the Commonwealth of Independent States - a regional organization comprised of a number of former Soviet Republics, including Russia.

But on the other end of the scale, only 25.1 percent of African citizens are using the internet, the report found, compared to 41.6 percent of Asia and 41.9 of Arab states.

Contrasting from country to country, the disparity in internet users can be especially stark. Iceland had the highest levels of internet use, with 98.2 percent, followed closely by a number of northern European nations such as Luxembourg (97.3 percent), Norway (96.8 percent) and Denmark (96.3 percent).

But in some countries, internet users were a tiny fraction of the population. Just 2.2 percent of Niger's citizens are internet users, the report estimated, followed by Chad (2.7 percent), Guinea-Bissau (3.5 percent) and Congo (3.8 percent). The ITU was unable to estimate internet users in some countries, including the restrictive regimes of North Korea and Eritrea.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the report found that richer countries tend to use the internet more than poorer nations. Eighty-one percent of the population in developed nations were internet users versus just 15.2 percent of the population of the least-developed countries. In the United States, 74.6 percent of the population use the internet - a high figure internationally, but lower than in many other wealthy nations.

There are now 3.9 billion people in the world who do not use the internet, the study found, and in addition to being poorer, they tend to be disproportionately less educated, rural, elderly and female.