Strange thing I experienced two decades ago. I went online in 2001 in local libraries. And I was surprised to find everyone everywhere on the internet spoke English. This was at the beginning of the age of the internet. So most people online were had lived most of their lives before then. Yet somehow most people in the world just seemed to naturally speak English. At least the ones online. Weird.
Not weird. Internet began long before 2001. It was created by DARPA as a redundant way to communicate among federal agencies esp. military. Then it was mostly scientists, professors, then lawyers and doctors who found it useful to collaborate from anywhere in the country. They could share their data and discuss it in groups, whereas before they would have to attend some symposium in person to do the same. So as this was a US only network in those early days everyone spoke English since they were all professionals, even if foreign. Let's not forget that every word of code that went into setting up the Internet, including the languages used to program it and user commands were in English. Once the WWW began in early to mid 90s, it was still a mostly US invention, but already the developed countries were catching up as webpages exploded. The ability to communicate with anyone anywhere in real time was here to stay, but the existing Internet structure and content was still mostly English. As businesses got online, the big market was English speakers online. This was during the tech boom around 1996-2000. So English was everywhere. Oh let's not forget that the most popular video games were first made by US companies, so by 2001, most kids already knew some English if they had a computer, way before the Internet. I hope that resolves your curiosity.
I moved to Amsterdam in 1996 because the Netherlands had high speed cable way before other countries. It made my business possible esp. in the LIBERAL social environment there at the time ...no more. Thankfully the Dutch are multilingual no doubt harking back to seafaring days. Their English is better than most Americans. Remember the Dutch teletext system on the cable TV? It started to get more interactive, then the Internet took over
Hollywood is another significant factor, that has promoted English as the most popular language for business, and predates the internet. Recent advances in AI are already making the language you use irrelevant, while my own work is in giving the machines emotional-logic, giving them the precision of quantum mechanics in translating anything. Already, the first movie was dubbed using AI to realistically make the actors lips synchronize as if they were speaking English. My work is in making them indistinguishable from people, so you won't know who you are talking to online.
