US no longer sets the agenda for the internet, as 80%+ of users are now outside the US, and China has more smartphone users than US and western Europe combined
Context & Ripple Effects
This closes an arc Benedict Evans has been charting for years: Mary Meeker's 2017 report already showed smartphone sales and internet growth slowing, and Evans followed in 2019 by noting that with roughly 4B of 5.3B adults carrying smartphones, industry analysis had shifted from tracking adoption to analyzing use. His February 2020 look at what a fully connected world means for the 2020s set up exactly this question of who now defines the internet's priorities.
The answer, per this piece, is demography: over 80% of users sit outside the US, and China alone has more smartphone users than the US and western Europe combined — consistent with Chinese government statistics claiming 800M-plus internet users back in 2018 and with Nikkei's finding that China accounted for 23% of cross-border data flows in 2019, nearly double the US share. Agenda-setting power follows the user base.
First-order effects
- US-headquartered platforms and investors lose their default assumption that American usage patterns define product norms — the marginal user, and the majority of any global audience, is now Asian.
- China's scale as the single largest smartphone base makes its domestic market outcomes — which apps win, which payment and content habits form — directly relevant to global category definitions rather than a regional exception.
Second-order effects
- Ad-market concentration documented in the related coverage — Google and Facebook owning 85% of online-ad growth — gets tested against markets where those companies' reach is structurally limited, opening pricing and distribution space for regional ad platforms.
- Cross-border data-flow leadership gives China leverage in setting technical and regulatory precedents that other large emerging markets can adopt, forcing US firms to comply with rules written abroad rather than exported from home.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, internet governance and platform design converge on the priorities of the largest user populations, with the US role shrinking from rule-setter to one large participant among several — a structural reversal of the previous two decades.
- The analytical frame itself changes permanently: with saturation reached, competition shifts from who gets online to whose norms govern what happens online, making data-flow shares and domestic user counts the metrics that matter.
The trend: The internet's center of gravity is completing its move from the US to Asia, shifting agenda-setting power from American platforms and regulators to the markets where most users actually live.