Defining the Digital Divide

July 22 -- There’s nothing worldwideabout the World Wide Web.

Only one in 20 people around the world are online, and closeto 60 percent of Internet users live in North America eventhough it accounts for just five percent of the world’spopulation. In Africa, there are a mere 14 million phone lines— fewer than in Manhattan or Tokyo.

There has been mounting concern that developingcountries, which lack the resources to benefit economically frominformation and communication technologies, will be furthermarginalized by the networking revolution.

To address the issue, leaders of the Group of Eight nations decided today toestablish a task force, dubbed “DOT Force,” an acronym for Digital Opportunity Task Force, to search for waysto fuse the widening information technology (IT) gap betweenindustrial and developing countries.

The G-8 gave the aptly named task force the job of supporting thedevelopment of communications infrastructure in poor countriesand drawing them into the Internet-led economic revolution.

“Everyone, everywhere, should be enabled to participate in, and no one should be excluded from, the benefits of the globalinformation society,” the G-8 said in an IT charter.

The DOT Force has as yet nomembers, but the G-8 said it would conveneas soon as possible to promote policies that increase access tothe tools of information “in a manner responsive to the needsof developing countries.”

International Digital Divide

*not including wireless accessSource: Jupiter Communications

Divide Exists Within Nations

The Okinawa summit’s host, Japanese Prime Minister YoshiroMori, is himself on the slow side of what is now referred to asthe digital divide; he said last month that he had never toucheda computer keyboard in his life.

As Mori’s embarrassing admission illustrates, there aredigital divides within countries as well as between them.