This is a turning point. Today, half the people on the Internet are American. By 2004 it will only be a third, according to Mr Barry Parr, a senior analyst at the San Francisco-based International Data Corporation (IDC), and two-thirds of all Internet spending will then be outside the United States.

"Because nearly 80 per cent of Americans will be online, there is simply more opportunity for growth outside the US," he says.

Cisco - also from San Francisco - supplies most of the communications equipment that runs the Net, and its television advertisements show it knows what's going on. The advertisements present a series of children from around the world asking the same question: "Are you ready?"

They aren't. In fact, IDC's research shows that more than half the US sites surveyed are doing nothing to internationalise their sites and this could threaten their future.

Another US company, Forrester Research, says leading US websites now turn away almost half of the orders that originate outside the US, and that three-quarters of the sites aren't designed to handle non-US addresses or work out shipping costs.

"Businesses that don't begin preparing today could find themselves outflanked by their more internationally-oriented competitors," Mr Parr argues.

Of course, some are already well advanced. Yahoo!, the Microsoft Network (MSN) and a few others have been globalising their businesses for three or four years. As a result they are among the top five sites visited by home users in many countries, judged by the number of unique visitors per month, according to Media Metrix, an audience measurement company based in New York.

In its first multi-country survey, released this month, MSN took the top spot in Australia and Canada, while Yahoo! came top in Britain and Japan. But domestic websites are also appearing at or very near the top of the charts: examples include Freeserve in Britain, T-Online in Germany, Wanadoo in France and AtNifty in Japan.

Both Yahoo! and MSN are competing by making their local offerings as local as possible, and Yahoo! now also has operations in 20 countries including Brazil, China, Denmark, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Norway, Singapore and Taiwan.

Mr Jerry Yang, a co-founder of Yahoo! and himself born in Taiwan, says: "Our goal is get local when the growth starts to happen, and in Western Europe we think it's going to happen in the next year. It's already happening in Japan where we have a 100 per cent Japanese site. I would say it's probably the most important corporate priority for us to be truly global, but to do it in a way that allows local control of content, the product, and the flavour and culture. It's tough to do. Most media companies aren't that local. It's exciting and daunting at the same time.

"My belief is that, probably not too far in the future, very few people will care about US content; they will only care about local content. This is not like Disney movies. I think delivering Internet communications, content and services is about creating somewhere where you belong, which is primarily something that's in your neighbourhood, not in California. "Just having local content is not enough, but if you don't have a rich offering that's part of people's lives 24 hours a day - which is extremely local - then I don't think you'll be successful."

"Everybody talks about it, very few people really do it," says Mr Dan Pelson, president and chief executive of Bolt, which is based in New York and has just opened a British site. He has even coined a term for it: "glocalisation".

But Mr Pelson reckons that, in the long term, the global market for Bolt's chat sites, targeted at teens aged 15-20, is huge. "Just think," he exclaims, "40 per cent of India will be under 20. There will be more people in our demographic than there are people in the US!"

India, China and other massive populations may be slow to come on to the Net, but usage is already exploding in Hong Kong, Korea, Singapore and Taiwan. These are countries with young populations, and they are also centres of PC production, where people can easily assemble their own machines from parts.

In South Korea, for example, the number of Internet users leapt from 3.4 million in February 1999 to 15.3 million in May 2000, according to Korea's Network Information Centre. With a third of the population online, Korea went to the top of Network Solutions' monthly chart for new dot.com name registrations outside the US, and Seoul was the top city, ahead of Hong Kong and London. But the globalisation of the Internet brings with it a problem that was amusingly highlighted by Prof Nicholas Negroponte, founder and director of the MIT Media Lab, at an IDC conference in Paris last September. "One day we're going to wake up and say: `Oh my God, I didn't realise that Spanish was the second biggest language on the Internet . . . after Chinese'."

Today, most people are happy to do their websurfing in English, even when it's their second language. According to IDC's Project Atlas II, which polled 29,000 Internet users around the world, 72 per cent currently prefer to surf in English, though the proportion falls from 97 per cent in the US to 48 per cent in western Europe, 25 per cent in Latin America and only 16 per cent in Japan.

However, IDC predicts that the number who prefer English will fall to 64 per cent by 2003, and Mr Parr argues that "as the Net becomes less of a tool of the elite and more commonplace, the population of non-English-speakers will grow even faster".

Translating websites into local languages could soon become an enormous problem - and an enormous business for machine translation companies such as Lernout & Hauspie (L&H), Systran and e-Translate.

Mr Kevin Lim, vice-president of Lernout & Hauspie's Asia Pacific subsidiary in Singapore, says that, today, more than 70 per cent of Internet content is in English but more than 80 per cent of the world's population are not native English speakers.

To tackle the problem, L&H has research teams in Korea, Singapore and Japan working on speech recognition (speech to text), language translation (text to text) and voice generation (text to speech).

The results are not as good as human translation, which L&H also offers, but machine translation is very cheap and very fast. "Our first priority is really delivering three languages - Japanese, Korean and Mandarin Chinese - with Tamil, Hindi, Malay and Thai to follow," Mr Lim says. "Cantonese is on the roadmap as well. But there are 205 spoken languages in China alone, and 15 national languages in India."

Obviously L&H, a Belgian company, is not creating products solely for Internet use. However, Mr Lim believes speech will become the most common way of accessing the Net in the Asia Pacific region.

He points out that keyboards were not designed to input Asian languages, and that it's much more natural to use a speech recognition system.

Mr Lim also argues that mobile phones are already more common than PCs in many regions. "In the USA," he says, quoting figures from Ericsson, "there's one mobile phone for every four PCs, whereas in China, there are 10 mobile phones for every PC!"

The lack of an established telecommunications structure will, he thinks, enable some Asia Pacific countries to leapfrog the West by rapidly adopting mobile phones and wireless organisers for Internet access.

China has only 12.3 million Internet users, less than 1 per cent of its 1.3 billion population, according to recent research by Hong Kong-based Iamasia (Interactive Audience Measurement Asia). Many of those have access only through universities and cybercafes. The potential for growth is enormous, but may also depend on a more liberal political climate.

However, it would be hypocritical to criticise China when Britain is planning to trample human rights underfoot in forcing through an e-commerce killer, the RIP (Regulation of Investigatory Powers) Bill.

But while imagining the Internet of the near future as multi-lingual, multi-cultural, mobile and truly global, don't count out the Americans yet. They still have the economic power and own most of the big brands on the Net.

An unofficial policy discussion group, the Global Business Dialogue on Electronic Commerce, which held a conference in New York in April, reckoned that 85 per cent of the revenue from Internet businesses goes to US companies, and 95 per cent of the stock market value of Internet properties is held by US companies.

Sooner or later they will feel the need to expand in a hurry, and because "no company can expand into all markets at once", as Mr Parr says, they'll do it by acquisition. IDC is therefore predicting "a wave of global mergers", and it's not hard to imagine Yahoo!, AOL, e-Bay, Amazon and other American giants doing most of the buying.

In other words, the globalisation of the Internet could turn out much like the globalisation of the computer business, which is now worth $2 trillion a year.

Like the Net, the computer industry started in the US, but there was a flowering of overseas suppliers before US companies such as IBM, Digital Equipment Corp, Hewlett-Packard, Compaq and Dell became multinational operations and squeezed out most of the local competition.