For the next century or so, I think English is the winner. A more thoroughly phonetic language like Spanish or Norwegian would make more sense but English is the language that most programming languages are based on, it's had a good head start on the internet for some time now, and it's the most common language used for Western international relations.
I seriously doubt the rest of the world is ever going to warm up to the idea of everybody having a passing fluency in Mandarin and Cantonese. I could learn Arabic a lot faster than I could learn those and I imagine most of the rest of the world with vaguely phonetic character systems could too.
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