This is one of the findings by the ongoing World Internet Project which studies the the use and effects of the Internet in seven countries around the world, including New Zealand.
The study lead by the Californian based Centre for the Digital Future has been running for the past eight years, director and project leader Jeff Cole said.
He was in Queenstown this week for the release of the Internet in New Zealand 2007 final report and the NetSafe cyber safety conference.
While cyber safety is not his area of expertise, Dr Cole said he has been very interested in the topics and issues raised and how it impacts on his research into digital social networking.
"Certainly, the Internet has the best and the worst of people in the world [using it]," he said.
As well as providing a wealth of good information which helped people, it could also be used by "predators, scammers and terrorists" to make the world a more unsafe place.
One of the strengths of the Internet - communication and bringing people and ideas together - no matter where they were based - had been exploited by New Zealanders and had improved the country's position in the world.
"I think it would be fair to say New Zealand is the most remote significant country in the world," Dr Cole said.
"Twenty-five years ago there were positives and negatives to that. Today, I would say most of the negatives have been cancelled out by the Internet."
Dr Cole's area of expertise has been in more traditional forms of media - but with the rise of the Internet in the 1990s he became convinced it would outstrip even television as the most powerful information tool on the planet.
"With television, we lost a great opportunity when it was first developed," Dr Cole said.
"We should have monitored its uptake and what effect it had on people's lives when it was first introduced."
Rather than let a similar opportunity go by again, eight years ago Dr Cole decided to study groups of people and whether they used the Internet, how they used it and what effect it had on their lives.
"We have watched as non-users have gone to dial up and then to broadband," he said.
"And then there are the 2% of users who drop the Net altogether - we are looking at why they do that and if they ever come back to it.
"We also look at the never-users."
Beginning in the United States, the research is now carried out in seven countries around the world, including Great Britain, Australia, Canada and Colombia.
Dr Cole said New Zealand had a "lot to be proud of" when it came to using the Internet.
New Zealand and the United States had a lot in common when it came to Internet usage figures and had the smallest gender divide of anywhere else studied.
"The gender divide is negligible - less than 1%," he said.
However most New Zealanders are still reliant on slow dial-up Internet connections which limited its usefulness in daily life.
"A lot of people think of the speed as being great - but really it is deeper than that.
"It is having the Internet there all the time that is the great thing."
For most New Zealanders - particularly those on lower incomes and Pacific Island people and Maori - that interaction with the Internet is still unobtainable, because of the price and also because the broadband available to New Zealanders is slow compared with what is available in other countries.
