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It's a figure that generates both great hope and substantial concern. In December, the worldwide number of Internet-users topped 1 billion for the first time in the short but fast-paced evolution of cyberspace.

A major barrier has been breached, but many more are also ripe for easy overthrow. The new world is whizzing past just about everyone, and ironically everyone is contributing to that breakneck speed. There are other interesting, related numbers. Asia is bursting with new users, and the continent boasts 41 per cent of Internet use, compared to 28 per cent in North America and 18 per cent in Europe. This alone will have a big say in the directions of the Internet, particularly in language. Although a sizeable percentage of Europe speaks English in some capacity (as does Asia), the new numbers indicate that most of the world's Internet traffic will most likely be communicated using some non-English language. China, for example, has 179 million users, topping the list of wired countries; the United States comes second with 163 million; Japan, Germany and the United Kingdom round out the top five.

Surpassing 1 billion global users was something only waiting to happen, yet it is still a landmark in the history of the Internet. Magid Abraham, president and CEO of comScore, which that conducted the research and survey, lauded it as the first major achievement of the Internet in forging "the increasingly unified global community that reminds us that the world truly is becoming more flat". He predicted that the "second billion" would be online "before we know it", and the "third billion will arrive even faster than that, until we have a truly global network of interconnected people and ideas that transcend borders and cultural boundaries."

That sounds truly exciting, as if we aren't very excited already. Now songs can be composed and played and performed before millions by artists who have never met each other in person and who live on opposite sides of the world. Cheap cameras can play a role in real-time broadcasting and put expensive TV-station gadgets to shame thanks to the Internet. If they do proper searches, poor students with an online computer can find priceless study materials that 10 years ago were only available to the richest with the means to travel to the US, Europe or Australia. It changes how politics is played, how romantic courting is done and simply how like minds or opposed minds are connected and interact. Facebook recorded almost twice the number of global visitors in December than longtime leader MySpace.com, the pioneer of the social-networking phenomenon. The month saw Facebook having almost 222 million unique visitors whereas MySpace came in at 125 million. As to the most popular of all online destinations, the Google family of sites led all online properties in December with 777.9 million visitors. Microsoft was next, with 647.9 million visitors, followed by the Yahoo sites with 562.6 million visitors and Facebook with 222 million visitors, a drastic 127-per-cent growth for the social-networking site.

All these promising statistics were not achieved without a big price, though. This week's exposure in Thailand of an expanding number of schoolgirls offering sex for sale on the web confirms the cyberspace's alarming power to promote and generate vice on a scale never seen before. Illegal downloads have crippled various entertainment companies, which, however, are working day and night to take advantage of the Internet. Media firms have been rocked and overwhelmed by citizen reporting, cut-and-paste news sites offering information for free and news-consumers' shift toward that kind of information and interactive media consumption. Dirty political games have been transpiring online. But such things are the cost of this new form of democracy, a "truer" democracy in many people's view. Opportunities provided by the Internet must simply be taken by all. New knowledge is being grabbed, exchanged, shared and spawning new knowledge. Ideologies are being tested, challenged and questioned, not by those who used to have the power to say "this is right" or "that is wrong", but by common people searching for their own truths.

Unlike other systems of human coexistence, the Internet empowers rather than weakens the general public. The "key players" like YouTube, MSN and Facebook coexist peacefully with their users. There are no such things as the powers that be in our "real life" on the Internet.

The challenge, obviously, is simply how we can keep it that way. The urge to "control" knows no bounds, and that instinct will keep trying to find a way in. The 1-billion benchmark, achieved in so short a time, however, may be the biggest guarantee that the Internet can take good care of itself.