The internet never stops growing. Every minute, people post thoughts, products, photos and arguments. The International Telecommunication Union estimates that around three-quarters of the world’s population now uses the internet, up from about one in six in the mid-2000s. In October 2025 the Internet Archive, the nonprofit that runs the Wayback Machine, celebrated saving its trillionth web page.
That is a staggering amount of information. The harder question is whether human knowledge is growing at anything like the same rate.
Information versus knowledge
Some of what goes online is plainly valuable: a clinical trial result, a tutorial that teaches someone a trade, a digitized letter from an archive that only historians could see before. Much more is ephemeral: celebrity gossip, product listings, arguments that will not matter next week. Even that has some value. It satisfies curiosity, and curiosity is how people learn. But a larger pile is not automatically a wiser one.
The real gift is access
The internet’s greatest contribution may be less about volume and more about speed and reach. A student in a small town can read the same journal articles, watch the same lectures and browse the same library catalogs as a student at a major university. That was not true a generation ago.
And the real risk is loss
The internet also forgets. Studies of “link rot” keep finding that a large share of links in older articles and court opinions no longer work. A 2024 Pew Research Center analysis found that about a quarter of web pages that existed at some point between 2013 and 2023 were no longer accessible. Websites close, domains lapse, and pages vanish. Without archives, much of what we think is permanent would simply disappear.
So, yes, the internet is expanding. Whether that turns into lasting knowledge depends on what we choose to read, check, cite and keep.
Sources: Facts and Figures, International Telecommunication Union; Internet Archive Blogs; When Online Content Disappears, Pew Research Center.
