The purpose of this study is a comparative assessment of the development of mass higher education in the regions and countries on the basis of the results of Webometrics. Main tasks: Comparison of national educational systems in terms of the scale of mass higher education; assessment of the quality of mass higher education; study of the growth of the network activity of Russian universities (2007-2014) in Federal districts. The methodology is based on the comparison of the number of universities in the country/region included in several thousands of best universities in the world (6 indicators: N[subscript 2000], N[subscript 3000], N[subscript 4000], N[subscript 5000], N[subscript 10000], N[subscript 20000]). Evaluation of the quality of mass higher education is made on a conditional parameter--the share of ranked universities in the country/region included in top 5000 (N[subscript 5000]) in the total number of ranked universities among 20000 (N[subscript 20000]). Originality of research: new aspects of leadership of countries and regions in the Webometrics ranking, their quantitative expression. Among new facts--the leadership of China by the conditional indicator of quality of mass higher education.