ine Multimedium, Jean-Pierre Cloutier, author of Chroniques de
Cyberie, a weekly cybermagazine widely read in the French-speaking Internet
community, explained:

"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 many European surfers spend much less time on the Web than they
would like, or choose to surf at night to cut their expenses. At the end of
1998, in several countries (Italy, Germany, France, etc.), surfers began to
boycott the Internet for one day to make phone companies aware of their needs
and give them a special monthly rate.

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%.

To reach as large an audience as possible, the solution is to create bilingual,
trilingual, even multilingual sites. The website of the Belgian daily newspaper
Le Soir presents the newspaper in six languages: French, English, Dutch, German,
Italian and Spanish. The French Club des poetes (Club of Poets), a French site
dedicated to poetry, presents its site in English, Spanish and Portuguese.
E-Mail-Planet, a free e-mail address provider, provides a menu in six languages
(English, Finnish, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish).

As the Web quickly spreads worldwide, more and more operators of
English-language sites which are concerned by the internationalization of the
Web recognize that, although English may be the main international language for
exchanges of all kinds, not everyone in the world reads English.

Since December 1997 any Internet surfer can use AltaVista Translation, which
translates English web pages (up to three pages at the same time) into French,
German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish, and vice versa. The Internet surfer
can also buy and use Web translation software. In both cases he will g