9. Norway

Norway ranks ninth overall on the global list, with the highest marks for Social Impact (4), Communications Infrastructure (5), and Web Usage (7). Norway is having an advanced IT infrastructure, with broadband penetration of 36.6%, amongst the highest in the world in 2011, and 94% of households having access to a personal computer. This has helped to facilitate one of the highest usage rates of any country. In 2011 94% of Norwegians used the Web, bettered only by Iceland. Yet it ranks much lower in terms of available Web Content (16). It ranks 15th in Political Impact which is also rather low.

8. Australia

Ranking seventh for overall impact, ninth for the Web and tenth for Readiness, Australia takes eighth place overall in the first edition of the ranking. It gets the highest marks for Social Impact (5) and lowest for Economic Impact (14). Its Readiness ranking is 10, with a broadly similar performance in terms of communications infrastructure (11) and institutional infrastructure (9). Although scoring reasonably highly across most sub-indexes, it is noticeable that Australia lags behind leading European and North American economies in terms of core IT infrastructure, resulting in a lower rate of broadband penetration, slower bandwidth and so on.