ribution of the first browser Mosaic (the ancestor of
Netscape) from November 1993 onwards, the Web too began to spread -- first in
the US thanks to considerable investments made by the government, then around
North America, and then to the rest of the world.

The fact that there are many more Internet surfers in the US and Canada than in
any other country is due to different factors -- these countries are among the
leaders in the latest computing and communication technologies, and hardware and
software, as well as local phone communications, are much cheaper there than in
the rest of the world.

In Hugues Henry's article, La francophonie en quete d'identite sur le Web,
published by the cybermagazine Multimedium, Jean-Pierre Cloutier, author of
Chroniques de Cyberie, a weekly cybermagazine widely read in the French-speaking
Internet community, explains:

"In Quebec I am spending about 120 hours per month on-line. My Internet access
is $30 [Canadian]; if I add my all-inclusive phone bill which is about $40 (with
various optional services), the total cost of my connection is $70 per month. I
leave you to guess what the price would be in France, in Belgium or in
Switzerland, where the local communications are billed by the minute, for the
same number of hours on-line."

It follows that Belgian, French or Swiss surfers spend much less time on the Web
than they would like, or choose to surf at night to cut somehow their expenses.

In 1997, Babel -- a joint initiative from Alis Technologies and the Internet
Society, ran the first major study of the actual distribution of languages on
the Internet. The results are published in the Web Languages Hit Parade, dated
June 1997, and the languages, listed in order of usage, are: English 82.3%,
German 4.0%, Japanese 1.6%, French 1.5%, Spanish 1.1%, Swedish 1.1%, and Italian
1.0%.

In Web embraces language translation, an article published in ZDNN (ZD Network
News) of July 21, 1998, Martha L. Stone explained:

"This year, the number of new non-English websites is expected to outpace the
growth of new sites in English, as the cyber world truly becomes a 'World Wide
Web.' [...] According to Global Reach, the fastest growing groups of Web newbies
are non-English-speaking: Spanish, 22.4 percent; Japanese, 12.3 percent; German,
14 percent; and French, 10 percent. An estimated 55.7 million people access the
Web whose native language is not English. [...] Only 6 percent of the world
pop