In 2020, the profit of the darknet markets amounted to $1.7 billion. According to Tor Metrics, in 2022, the United States leads in the number of users of the dark web (22.28%), Germany is in second place (14.93%), followed by Finland (5.47%) and the Netherlands (4.40%).
The darknet periodically appears in the headlines of the media when the authorities cover one or another black marketplace, and every year more and more users learn about the dark web. Someone became a victim of cybercriminals, and someone went to the dark side himself.
We figured out what the darknet is, how it appeared and what black marketplaces exist.
Deep web and dark web: What you didn’t know about the Internet
So, to get a clear picture of what the deep web and darknet are, imagine Sigmund Freud’s iceberg, with which an Austrian psychologist structured the components of our psyche — Ego, Superego and Id. Only in our case, the iceberg levels will be Surface web (surface — surface), Deep web (deep — deep) and Dark web (dark — dark).
What is surface web?
This is the tip of the iceberg, here we are in a state of free surfing: we can access all the necessary web resources without having to observe anonymity by hiding our IP address.
Free resources — Wikipedia, Google, e-commerce marketplaces, Facebook and YouTube, which belong to the surface web — have long been part of our daily life and, of course, there is nothing illegal in visiting them.