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Facebook and Netflix they have a hard time hiring new people who want what they have to offer. At least for now, user numbers are dwindling.

There are complex reasons growth recessions, and we’ll learn more later today when Facebook’s parent company Meta releases its quarterly financial report. This issue of the newsletter is about a challenge they and other internet companies around the world share: the untapped potential in the billions of people who have never been online.

Serving more than three billion people in the world, more than four out of 10 people do not use the internet at home or on their phones, according to the latest information. predictions From the World Bank and the United Nations from 2019

in some of the world’s most populated countries, including Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nigeriamost people are not online.

even after Huge increase in online reach in India In recent years, about 60 percent of Indians do not use the internet. About half of people in Indonesia, the world’s fourth largest country, are also not online. For comparison, about 10 percent of Americans and a quarter of Brazilians are not online.

The tech world isn’t ignoring the gap between those who have and those who don’t, and the number of disconnected people is dwindling. But as digital services scramble to grab even more users, their ambitions are hampered by the fact that many of them are still offline or have poor service that prevents them from binge-watching Netflix, surfing YouTube, or insanely surfing Instagram.

there no silver bullet to the complex economic, cultural, technical and political barriers to getting more of the world’s citizens online. Advocates of the widespread use of the Internet say that being connected to the Internet is an economic engine and an increasing necessity of modern life. Internet connection is also a minimum requirement for Internet companies to reach potential customers.

I’m not saying that if 100 percent of the 1.4 billion people in India suddenly used the internet, they would all be Netflix subscribers. Now that Google, Facebook, Amazon and Netflix could be near saturation in the US, they’ve all made India a priority. But their growth is limited because at most they can reach around 600 million Indians online-only.

(A note about China, which has the world’s largest concentration of internet users: The country blocks many popular foreign digital services, making China inaccessible to Netflix, Facebook, Google, and others.)

Advocacy group research analyst Ana Maria Rodriguez Affordable Internet AllianceHe said official figures of online users can greatly underestimate how many people who don’t have regular access to the internet, can’t afford to go online often, have poor service or a combination of these.

He said the World Bank and UN count an internet user as anyone who has been online at least once in the past three months. According to their numbers, Two-thirds of people in Colombia were online As of 2019. However Research The Alliance for Affordable Internet found that only a quarter of Colombians have “meaningful” access, which includes consistent online connections at relatively high speeds.

Microsoft, Facebook, Google and other tech companies and executives have various projects to help expand internet access or tailor their apps to countries where millions of people can go online for the first time. Rodriguez, whose group receives funding from tech companies, said doing more could help billions of people and companies profit.

“It is in their interest to reach these people,” Rodriguez said, referring to global internet companies.

When I first started writing about technology over a decade ago, I would regularly ask managers if there was a limit to their growth because a lot of people weren’t online and for many people the service was bad. In rich countries like the USA I have a lot of blank stares.

Maybe they were right not to make the issue a high priority. More people were connected in those years and internet service improved in most countries. Facebook and Spotify are not experts at building mobile internet towers or breaking down social and financial barriers to getting more people online.

However, we are entering a period of easy growth for many successful internet companies. To continue reaching more people, they may need to think differently about the billions of people who have yet to connect.