First-order effects

• The findings give policymakers, development organizations, and connectivity providers a large cross-country evidence base for treating access as associated with wellbeing rather than presuming a net societal cost.
• The study shifts the burden in debates over internet harms toward identifying particular products, behaviors, or vulnerable groups, since a broad connectivity measure does not establish either universal benefit or individual causation.

Second-order effects

• Researchers and regulators face greater pressure to separate the effects of access itself from those of specific platform designs, content environments, and patterns of use—a distinction consistent with the earlier review of teen device-use evidence.
• Broad restrictions framed around internet use as a whole become harder to justify from wellbeing claims alone; targeted safeguards can become the more defensible policy response.

Third-order effects

• If subsequent work continues to distinguish general connectivity from product-level harms, the policy debate is likely to move from “is the internet good or bad?” toward which forms of access, use, and platform governance produce benefits or risks.
• Wellbeing measurement may become more central to digital-inclusion policy, but observational associations will still require careful interpretation before they support causal claims or one-size-fits-all interventions.