Contrary to initial fears, the World Wide Web has not become an English-language monoculture. What has emerged instead is a selective and competitive English-dominated multilingualism, which I will approach from three angles. The first part of the presentation will survey the economic, cultural and technological factors shaping online multilingualism and show how they generally favour languages that are spoken by large numbers of people in economically prosperous countries, but occasionally also open up opportunities for intelligent language activism promoting minority languages. The second part zooms in on English, as the current global lingua franca, and will explore how language technologies, from simple spell checkers to recent breakthroughs in AI-based text generation, have created a standardisation paradox. On the one hand, technology promotes further homogenisation and standardisation (though not necessarily along the lines of traditional norms of educated usage). On the other hand, it may also result in more diversification, giving public visibility to nonstandard varieties, especially those that happen to be associated with pop-cultural or subcultural trends. In the third and final part of my presentation, I will turn to the question of intelligent language-planning for a world in which the voices of the 6 billion people who do not speak English are not silenced and the continued spread of English is managed in ways that help economic progress and yet preserve cultural diversity in our communities.