Rajat Kanti Satpati / Oct 2026
Image: Shutterstock
Europe is already almost entirely connected to the internet. The latest completed annual Eurostat data, covering 2025, show that 93.8% of people aged 16 to 74 in the European Union had used the internet during the previous three months.
At first glance, that might suggest that the great European digital divide is disappearing.
The more interesting story begins after people go online.
The same 2025 data show that Europeans use the internet in very different ways. Communication is widespread, while more specialised activities remain much more uneven. The difference tells us something about what digitalisation actually means in everyday European life.
In 2025, 82.3% of people aged 16 to 74 in the EU used instant messaging and 81.6% sent or received emails. Phone and video calls reached 75.7%. These are now ordinary forms of communication. The internet has become part of daily infrastructure rather than a separate technological activity.
Move beyond communication, however, and the picture changes.
Internet banking was used by 69.7% of people aged 16 to 74 across the EU. The national figures ranged from 97.6% in Denmark to 31.0% in Romania. Reading online news reached 66.4%, with Finland at 89.6% and Italy at 54.4%. Seeking health information online stood at 60.3%, ranging from 82.2% in Finland to 37.0% in Bulgaria.
Online learning shows another substantial difference. Eurostat reported in March 2026 that 34.8% of EU internet users had taken an online course or used online learning materials during the relevant period in 2025. The figure had been 33.4% in 2024 and 21.4% in 2019. In 2025, the proportion reached 60.2% in the Netherlands and 59.7% in Ireland, compared with 11.8% in Romania.
These figures complicate the usual idea of a digital divide.
The first question in the digital divide debate was often about access. Who has an internet connection? Who owns a computer? Who can afford broadband? Those questions remain important in many parts of the world. Within the European Union, however, basic internet use has become so widespread that another question deserves greater attention: what do people actually do once they are connected?
A person can use the internet every day and still make relatively little use of online education, digital public services or electronic banking. Someone else may use the same infrastructure for learning, financial transactions, government services, professional work and new technologies.
Digitalisation therefore has several layers: connection, communication, transactions, information, education and interaction with public institutions. Generative artificial intelligence has now added another layer.
Eurostat’s 2026 digitalisation publication reports that 35% of people in the EU who had used the internet during the previous three months used generative AI tools in 2025. The figure was 49% in Greece, Estonia and Denmark, while it was 19% in Romania, 22% in Italy and 25% in Poland. Age differences were particularly large: 65% among internet users aged 16 to 24, compared with 14% among those aged 55 to 74.
The EU is therefore approaching near-universal internet use while digital capability remains much less universal.
Eurostat reports that 60% of people aged 16 to 74 in the EU had at least basic digital skills in 2025. The figure was 84% in the Netherlands, 83% in Ireland and 81% in both Denmark and Finland. It was 32% in Romania and 38% in Bulgaria.
The same pattern appears in the relationship between citizens and the state. In 2025, 71.9% of people aged 16 to 74 in the EU used websites or apps of public authorities, up 1.9 percentage points from 2024. Denmark recorded 98.0%, the Netherlands 96.2%, Finland 96.1% and Sweden 96.0%. Romania was at 24.1%, Bulgaria at 36.0% and Italy at 57.7%.
These differences should not automatically be read as a simple league table of technological success. Countries have different institutions, administrative systems, demographic structures and patterns of internet use. The statistics describe behaviour; they do not, by themselves, establish why the differences exist.
It is tempting to imagine digital Europe as a single process moving at one speed. The evidence suggests something more complicated. The EU is becoming connected as a whole, while different forms of digital participation continue to develop at different speeds.
A person may communicate digitally every day without using online learning platforms. A household may shop online without using digital public services. A young person may use generative AI while an older family member struggles with basic digital skills.
This changes how digital inequality should be measured. A single figure for internet access can tell us whether a population is connected. It tells us much less about whether people are learning online, using financial services, finding health information, interacting with public institutions or experimenting with new technologies.
The EU has largely moved beyond the problem of basic internet access. The more interesting question is what happens after everyone goes online.
