The Definitive Answer to
How much is the Internet Worth?
If you were to buy the internet, here’s how much would it cost you!
During an insightful conversation, one of my friends asked me — how much money I would need to buy the internet?
If you do a quick google search, it’ll tell you that the multi-billion dollar tech giant Cisco valued it at $19 Trillion. But that was in 2014, and incorrect today.
Its been 6 years and a lot has changed. So if you wanted to buy it in 2020, how much would you need in your bank account?
Well, first we need to get clear on two things.
First, the value that the internet provides is much more than how much it is worth(measurably in dollars). Someone can go from being homeless to having a degree and a job because of the internet, you can’t put a dollar value on that. That is the utility-value of the internet which varies for every individual on the planet.
Second, the internet(and the internet of things: IoT) is a great example of something called emergent properties. Simply put, emergent properties are when elements of a system can do and achieve more working together than summing the output of the individual parts. So, each brain cell can only do so much but all your brain cells working together produces greater output.
Before you spend your entire life savings on buying the internet,
Here’s how the Internet works (simplified)
So let's break it up: What do you have to buy?
Since buying every device connected to the internet isn’t feasible, and neither is buying every single modem/router; your best bet is buying all the servers that the internet runs on.
In the image, you see two types of servers: DNS and Internet servers.
Think of a DNS like a phonebook.
It stores websites instead of names and numbers. It's basically the memory that stores the information that we can access through the internet.
Internet servers are big mainframes that process search requests and send back information.
So that you don’t have to pay extra–you will either buy the memory(DNS) or the internet servers.
There is one small problem
The information available on the internet isn’t particularly selective. In layman’s terms, pieces of information are copied and stored in different servers. So even if you buy all the DNS in the world, you would be paying for duplicates.
That leaves us with one optimal solution:
Buy all Internet servers instead.
With this in mind, there’s good news and bad news.
The bad news is that buying individual servers globally would be very tedious. Here’s a map of all the root servers around the world:
The good news, however, is that all these are owned by corporations, so you just have to buy the corporations–at least the subsidiary that owns the servers.
Here’s a list of all the corporations that own web servers around the world:
Listed above is a mixture of companies that are fully dedicated to web servers (like Apache and Nginx) also subsidiaries of big tech conglomerates that own web servers (like IIS is a part of Microsoft, and OpenGSE is a part of Google).
The easiest way of buying their main asset–the web servers, is to just buy the whole corporation/subsidiary.
Interestingly, after calculating the net worth of all those corporations and subsidiaries, the total comes out to:
$31.4 Billion
+/- $2 Billion, due to the fact that not all net-worth figures are as of May 2020.
Now, this is a more feasible price tag, so why did Cisco value it at $19 Trillion 6 years ago?
Recall earlier in the article where I mentioned emergent properties. This article puts a price tag on what is perhaps the most crucial part of the internet, but the internet as an entity is so much more than that.
Similarly how one human life can be worth $1 million(after adding the value of all their organs), but the value that human produces during their lifetime can easily surpass $1 million.
So estimating a price for the internet as a whole is a guessing game because of how many unknown and immutable variables involved, but my educated guess would be around $30 Trillion.
But, if you wanted to buy the most important part of the internet, you could theoretically do that for a price of $33 Billion.
When I started writing this article, I thought it would be interesting to answer a question that didn’t have a straightforward answer–I soon realized why there isn’t an answer.
Researching all the variables and finding the dollar-amount values became quite tedious but ultimately an answer was found.
Despite the difficult process, I realized that finding an answer was quite rewarding.
If you have any other interesting questions that you think I should look into, feel free to leave it in the responses!
Have a great day, stay safe and stay indoors!
