The web is dead? Not yet.

Donald Marron

It depends on what you define as "the web". Browsers? Maybe. But internet traffic is higher than ever.

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A person poses with a magnifying glass in front of a Google search page in Shanghai on March 23. Google's Web search and mobile services in China were fully blocked on July 29, according to a message on the company's website. The Chinese characters read "Welcome to the new home for Google searching in China." Are browser-based web applications losing traction in America, too?

Stringer/Reuters/File

By Donald Marron, Guest blogger / August 26, 2010

Wired’s cover story this month, “The Web is Dead,” features the following chart showing the portion of internet traffic in different uses:

Donald Marron

Donald B. Marron is director of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center and a visiting professor at the Georgetown Public Policy Institute. He previously served as a member of the President's Council of Economic Advisers and as acting director of the Congressional Budget Office.

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• 08.26.10
  The web is dead? Not yet.

Over the past few years, peer-to-peer services and video have gobbled up an increasing share of traffic, while he “traditional” web — you know, surfing from site to site, reading your favorite blog about economics, finance, and life, etc. — has been declining.

Chris Anderson cites this as evidence of the pending death of the web. To which there is only one thing to say: wait a minute buster. Just because the web’s share of total bits and bytes is falling doesn’t mean it’s dying. Maybe it’s just that the other services are growing more rapidly.

One of the benefits of being off the grid for a week-plus is that other commentators have already had the same thought and have tracked down the relevant data. Kudos to Rob Beschizza at BoingBoing for charting the data in absolute terms. Rather than dying, the web is still growing like fresh bacteria in a petri dish:

[Image available at boingboing.net]

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