Chapter 3.2 Universal Access

Access: Definition and History

The concept of universal access to the means of communication varies in society according to the dominant means of communication and generally correlates with the social formation and other social structures. A general correlation also exists between the level of personal freedom and social democracy in a society and the universality of access to the means of communication. This is by no means assured of course, however a libertarian and democratic social system with a high degree of universality of access to the means of communication will have a higher degree of stability that one which does not. Without a significant degree of universality the conservative fears of democracy, the

ill-educated, immoral "mob rule" of the hoi polloi, as first enunciated by Plato in The Republic [Plato, The Republic, cf 389-519]. With a high level of access to the means of communication, a social system without a corresponding degree of personal freedom and social democracy will not only face crises in legitimation, it will also be weakened by the

inevitably rate of technological and cultural change that accompanies universality of access to the means of communication. Further, a specific distinction must be made between access to information and access to the means of communication. In the former case, the highest level of social democracy obtainable is meritocracy according to

pre-existing values and the cognitive faculty of memory. In the latter, the possibility exists for advancement by critique and the cognitive faculty of reason.

Access on an initial level suggests accessibility to a means of communication. However, there are other distortions and prerequisites to this concept. Firstly, even in the case of natural communication as the means, there is the question of communicative competence and performance, the capacities to express and understand symbolic values within a

grammatical structure. Secondly, there is the issues of linguistic competence and performance, the ability to express linguistic signs within a grammatical structure of language. Thirdly, symbolic values and grammatical structures have varying degrees of precision as signifiers to the signified along metaphorical (individual) and metonymic (normative) axes, which includes the effects of the unconscious (or rather, the "unexpressed") and distortions due to systematic rules and cultural norms. The matter is further complexified with the introduction of technically mediated communication. Matters of technical competence and performance is introduced simultaneously with concerns of access to the technology (whether by political rank or economic class) - and whether the agent has access to merely receive the information or to participate in the production and distribution of new material. In the most strict terms therefore,

perfect access must be distinguished from universal access. The former is an ideal, rather than idealized state of affairs. It requires access to technology which is utterly transparent, knowledge that is nomenal, rather than phenomenol, complete unity between the id, ego and superego, a degree of understanding in the symbolic exchange between

participants that is the equivalent of telepathy and utterly undistorted social relations.

[Leon Jones, Prolegama to a Theory of Communicative Competence, Center for Comparative Linguistics, University of Illinios, 1969 at: http://www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/499f98/libed/competence/titlepage.html]

[Wendy Hollway, Subjectivity and Method in Psychology, Sage, 1989]

Primitive social formations, relying on natural means of communication, are potentially very democratic. Social

nthropologists have always commented on how temporary and insecure the position of tribal leaders can be, regardless of

the existence of some sense of division of labour or genetic heritage. A skilled leader required the abilities to both

maintain stability within the tribe, but also account for emotive circumstances and contingencies. However, care must

be taken not to idealize this social arrangement. For it is abundantly clear through the example of primitive social

formations that near-universal access to the means of communications and information does not necessarily equate with

an enlightened democratic society that accords personal freedoms. Firstly, there is the significant problem of

erroneous knowledge and its reinforcement through ritual and taboo. Also, there is the problem of the sexual division

of knowledge and labour and subdivisions based on age among adult members of the community. The extent that a primitive

social formation engages in these distortions of the natural capacity for universal communication is the extent that

such a formation is antidemocratic.

The transition from primitive social formations to traditional is well documented and debated. Whether animal husbandry

preceeded vegetable cultivation, or whether metal working preceeded pottery, is not the concern here. What is important

to the question of universal access was the technical introduction of written records, with the benefits that such

records bring, and the development of an exclusive caste of religious authorities who had access to both literacy and

to said records. As Frederich Engles, the tripartriate new systematic relations and institutions of "Family, Private

Property and the State" occurred at relatively the same time, although the available evidence is that permanent written

records were not introduced for several thousand years vegetable cultivation, animal domestication, and etc, although

methods of tokens and tallies were. Commerce and property records proceeded literature, moral and legal justifications

appeared soon after. Even God apparently ensured that moral and legal commandments where inscribed with the written

word, which of course, on the literate could read and interpret.

Thus for some, there was the new vested interest of being the member of an elite class, a participant in the ruling

class, or to be specific one of the ruling classes. For whilst the overwhelming majority of working people, the

pastrolists, the farmers, the fishers, the retailers, servants and slaves had relatively equivalent but often

non-existent rights, the ruling classes (the elite warrior-generals, the priests and in some cases the highest elements

of the merchant class) had highly stratified and specific roles and responsibilities. Indeed, they had the highest

degree of specialization and division of labour and usually at least some degree of literacy. This was no means

universal of course. Attempts apparently were made to introduce a system of social institutions based on the

participation of the citizenship according to the previously existing means of communication (i.e, natural speech), for

example apparently in ancient Mesopotamia (although recent research disputes this), early Slavic and Iroquois

democracies and Scandanvia.

[cf., Marc Van De Mieroop, The Ancient Mesopotamian City. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. and "Primitive Democracy in

Ancient Mesopotamia," Journal of Near Eastern Studies 2 (1943): 159-172; "Early Political Development in Mesopotamia,"

Zeitschrift für Assyriologie 52(1957): 91-140. Both in Toward the Image of Tammuz, ed. W. L. Moran. Harvard Universit

Press, 1970]

[Florin Curta, Feasting with "Kings" in an Ancient "Democracy": Early Medieval Slavic Society of the Early Middle Ages

(Sixth to Seventh Century, A.D.) in Essays in Medieval Studies: Proceedings of the Illinios Medieval Association -

Medieval Communities, Vol 15, 1998, pp 19-28]

Notably the most advanced traditional social formations were those which extended the accessibility of the technology

of writing to the greatest extent of the population (e.g., the Egyptian Kingdom, Imperial China, Athenian Democracy and

the Roman Republic), indeed to any extent at all. Some societies that developed developed the agrarian and

pastoralist means of production never developed writing - and remained technologically quite limited. But even in the

ancient Athenian democracy, "universal access" meant almost exclusive access for the male citizenry which must have

never numbered more than 10% of the population at any point in time. In traditional social formations it was the

various Chinese dynasties that provided the most widespread access to literacy. Whilst their societies were by no means

democratic, they were mostly meritocratic along the extremely conservative values of Confucianism. At its height,

minimal literacy was obtainable regardless of social rank, although in nearly all cases the education content for women

was more orientated towards instilling a sense of obedience to their future husbands, rather than literacy and the

possibility of public service in line with the systematic enforcement of gendered political rank.

The transition from primitive to social formations radically increased the disparity in social divisions, whilst at the

same time radically increased the capacity of a society to deal with natural disaster, particularly food shortages. The

role of the communications and information technology written word and the relationship with literacy must not be

underestimated in considering both this disparity and this capacity. The technology of writing a means to transfer

technical, regulative and expressive knowledge from generation to generation with a degree of exactness and the

possibility of improvement. However access to this technology was mediated by systematic relations. Whilst the

development of a specialist class of literati was inevitable given the conditions and technical means of the time, the

accordance of particular political benefits to this specialist class and the political exclusion of people according to

the heritage of labour activity or biological sex was not. These latter examples of political irrationalism, whether

malicious, ignorant or a combination thereof, were not universal, but certainly very common manifestations of an

anti-democratic ethos.

[Further discussion on the veritical and horizontal differentation and the relationship between literacy and polity of

agrarian society can be found in Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, Cornell University Press, 1983, pp.8-14]

The development of modernity and the fact it had its origins in Europe rather than elsewhere has been subject to

significant debate, which will be discussed in the greater depth in section 4-1 of this study. Suffice to say at this

stage, initial attempts at the secularization of knowledge, through the University system originating in Italy and the

Renaissance provided inspirational, like the secularization of knowledge in Ancient Greece or by the Mutazilites of

the Islamic world, but lacked the material conditions for a qualitative change in social formation. Rather the

development of the movable type printing press, the unification of several pre-existing technologicies (the screw press

from the production of wine or olive oil, block printing technology from China, paper making techniques, also from

China, oil-based inks) and Gutenberg's own contribution of type trays.

[Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in

Early Modern Europe, Camridge University Press, 1979, 2 vol.]

The political and economic transformations that followed this invention are well known. In the following one hundred

years after the introduction of movable type printing, the Protestant reformers displayed its revolutionary potential

to great effectiveness with the use of printed seditious propaganda, which would have been extraordinarily difficult

and risky in use of other printing methods, for example block printing. For the first time in hundreds of years an

opportunity arose to challenge the institutional authority of the specialist class of moral, aesthetic and scientific

censors. At first, localized independence from the dictates of the Imperial church was sufficient. However as literacy

continued to increase, the demands for mass democracy became more prevalent, albeit painfully slow. National monarchs

did their utmost to slow down the rate of change through constitutional covenants and the extension of parliamentary

rights. As late as 1832, the right to vote in Great Britian existed for only 5 percent of the population over twenty

and of course, continued to replicate political rank based on gendered justifications. This situation did not change

until the functional utility of universal elementary education was realized and first implemented in the United Kingdom

in 1870, which became free elementary education by 1891.

[Robert Dahl, On Democracy, 1998, Yale University Press, p22]

[Richard D. Altick, The English Common Reader, University of Chicago Press, 1957]

Whilst the degree of literacy reached by advanced industrial nations, through both the technological mechanization of

producing written material and sytematic intervention, would appear to be of giddying heights to traditional social

formations it is imperative to note that the dominant means of communication had been substantially altered and new

forms of dominant instititionalized systematic differentiation had been established. Whilst political democracy, where

it existed in its varying degrees, meant that those who were entitled to vote did have equal opportunity to determine

the political representatives, to a large extent it was now economic class relations that determined relative access to

the dominant means of communication. The oft-quoted phrases by media A. J. Liebling expresses the problem succinctly:

"Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one" and "The function of the press in society is to inform,

but its role is to make money".

Of course, press freedom has been a matter of some curtailment. There has not been a governing authority in existence

that has allowed complete press freedom, even if one screens defamatory and untrue statements from such a definition,

as the following section will show - not even the United States of America, with the celebrated First Ammendment

which supposedly ensures freedom of the press. Even however, if this freedom was ensured economic class relations would

still persist and the profit imperative would be orientated not necessarily towards the provision of information to the

public good, but rather the provision of what the capitalist press manager considered to have the greatest possibility

of profit, which would invariably be entertainment orientated towards the lowest common denominator. The same remarks

are equally appliciable to the electronic means of communication which required centralization of location and of

capital for distribution, such as television and to a lesser extent radio.

The recent development of the Internet introduces a qualitatively different character to the question of universal

access to the means of communication, assuming that (and all indications suggest the affirmative) that the Internet

will become the dominant and international means of communication and the dominant provider of information in coming

decades. At the current level of development, Internet access provides the capacity for each reader of mass-produced

and distributed information to be a mass-producer of information, that is, to directly engage in publically distributed

communication. Every reader of the press is a producer of press through a massive decentralization of capital and

location, at a minimal cost compared to that of physically printed or hand-inscribed material and increasingly with

multimedia capacity.

Of course, this description makes certain assumptions which make up the critical issues for this subsection and with

the counterfactual idealized recommendations at the conclusion of the subsection. Firstly, there is the question of

actual physical connectivity which is analyzed from a geopolitical and historical basis. Secondly, there are the

concerns of the ability to utilize the technology, both in terms of varying physical ability and technological

literacy. Thirdly, there are the structural distortions of culture and language and gender and finally, the systematic

problems of economic class capacity and affordibility. It is these functions that directly hamper the prospect of the

first dominant means of communication since natural speech whose production is decentralized to the point of the

individual and with significantly greater capacity in memory and ability to transcend the limitations of space and

time.

3.2.2 International Use and Connectivity

Physical connectivity to the Internet occurs in a historical and geopolitical context, of which the nation-state is

used as the working unit of analysis. Whilst the general history of Internet connectivity has already been discussed

(section 1-3) this discussion involves a greater level of detail and correlation with other key political and economic

indicators. The purpose is to display the degree that the Internet is not a globally accessible means of communication

and the degree of uneven development that permeates the world. For it is absolutely imperative to realize, barring

extraordinary circumstances, that future development of the Internet will correlate with future globalization. The

nation-state, whilst a current unit of analysis, will increasingly be replaced by global analysis, global issues,

global economics and global politics.

Physical connection can be described in a number of ways which are combined here, although there is some incompleteness

according to data resources. On the most simple level there is the matter of basic connectivity and access to services

(from email upwards). Following this there is the question of bandwidth and bandwidth per capita, number of Internet

Service Providers, hosts, and computers per capita. Global data is presented along with selections that balances the

examples of economic development and population. Thus, the twenty most populous nation-states in the world are included

along with the six most populated nations with a GDP over $14,500 per capita (United States of America, Japan, France,

Germany, United Kingdom, Italy), the seven most populated nations with a GDP under $4,500 per capita (India, Indonesia,

Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Vietnam, Egypt) and the seven most populated nation states in between (China, Russia,

Brazil, Mexico, Philipines, Turkey, Iran, Thailand). Combined, these nations represent over 70% of the world's

population and, needless to say, the selection method ensures that income levels are comparative with the international

average and distribution.

On a global scale, world population as of 2002 stands at almost 6 234 million of which 70.4% are over the age of

fourteen with literacy at 83% for men and 71% for women. GDP purchasing power per capita in U.S. dollars is at $7 600.

An estimated 10 350 Internet Service Providers provide connection for almost 581 million individual users, that is 9%

of the global population at a rate of just over 56 000 users per Internet Service Provider. This latter figure is

clearly indicative of the quantity of people who are "Internet users" in the loosest sense of the word, that is, they

may have an email or webmail account which they rarely access, which compares quite unfavourably to the elite digital

users with xDSL access or higher and who are rarely offline. The "traffic index" below is derived from response time

and packet loss represented on a scale from 0 to 100 and averaged when multiple regions are used.

[Internet Traffic Report for July 7, 17:00 TPT http://www.internettrafficreport.com/]

The total variables are expressed on the following table, arranged in order of per capita purchasing power:

Nation-state, Purchasing Power Per Capita, Gini Index, Population (millions), Density (per sq kilometre, 1996),

Urbanization (1996), Literacy (T/M/F), Internet Providers, Internet Users (millions), Internet Users Per Capita,

Computers Per Capita, Traffic Index

U.S.A., $36300, 41, 280.6, 28, 75%, 97%/97%/97%, 7 000, 165.75, 0.591, 0.574, 90

Japan, $28000, 25, 127, 337, 78%, 99%/na/na, 73, 56, 0.441, 0.316, 68

Germany, $26600, 30, 83.3, 234, 85%, 99%/na/na, 200, 32.1 million, 0.385, 0.332, 84

France, $25700, 33, 59.8, 107, 74%, 99%/99%/99%, 62, 17, 0.284, 0.300, na

United Kingdom, $25 300, 37, 59.8, 247, 90%, 99%/na/na, 400, 34.3, 0.574, 0.338, 82

Italy, $25200, 27, 57.7, 190, 70%, 98%/na/na, 93, 19.25, 0.334, 0.178, 82

Mexico, $9000, 52, 103.4, 49, 71%, 90%/92%/87%, 51, 3.5, 0.034, 0.06, 88

Russia, $8800, 40, 145, 9, 73%, 98%/100%/97%, 35, 18, 0.124, 0.043, 71

Brazil, $7400, 59, 176, 19, 78%, 83%/83%/83%, 500, 13.98, 0.079, 0.048, 71

Turkey, $7000, 42, 67.3, 80, 69%, 85%/94%/77%, 50, 2.5, 0.037, 0.037, na

Thailand, $6600, 41, 62.4, 122, 31%, 94%/96%/92%, 15, 1.2, 0.019, 0.024, na

China, $4600, 40, 1284.3, 126, 36%, 82%/90%/73%, 3, 45.8, 0.036, 0.000, 52.5

Phillipines, $4000, 46, 84.5, 283, 47%, 95%/95%/94%, 33, 4.5, 0.053, 0.017, na

Egypt, $3700, 29, 70.7, 64, 49%, 51%/64%/39%, 50, .6, 0.008, 0.11, 0.011, na

Indonesia, $3000, 32, 231.3, 102, 42% 84%/90%/78%, 24, 4.4, 0.019, 0.010, 36

India, $2540, 38, 1045.8, 277, 27% 52%/66%/38%, 43, 7, 0.007, .004, 63

Pakistan, $2100, 31, 147.7, 163, 32%, 43%/55%/29%, 30, 1.2, 0.008, .004, na

Vietnam, $2100, 36, 81.1, 246, 20%, 94%/96%/91%, 5, .4, 0.005, .007, na

Bangladesh, $1750, 34, 133.4, 996, 16%, 63%/49%/56%, 10, .15, 0.001, .002, na

Nigeria, $ 840, 51, 129.9, 113, 40%, 57%/67%/47%, 11, .1, 0.001, .006, na

[Two other nations for comparison; one representing where the author is located at the conclusion of this study and

one where for the institution where the study is conducted through.

Australia, $27 000, 35, 19.5 million, 2, 85%, 100%/100%/100%, 571, 10.63, 0.545, 0.460

East Timor, $ 337, 38, .8 million, 56, 23%, 44%/51%/36%, 1, <.001, unknown ]

[Data from CIA World Factbook 2002, the International Telecommunications Union 2002, United Nations Population

Information Network, Traffic Index and http://www.mapzones.com. China's ratio is 0.0005 computers per 1,000 people.

Some exceptions to population density figures where data from the CIA World Factbook is used. ]

Based on the selected nation-states data, an extremely strong correlation coefficient of Internet connectivity is with

purchasing power per capita (r = 0.96), closesly followed by computers per capita (r = 0.91), with strong correlations

based on literacy ( r = 0.58), and a moderate negative correlation based on Gini Index ( r = -0.31) and number of ISPs

per million users (r = -0.24). Geographic proximity and bandwith of course is a precondition to connectivity and any

other correlations, thus international and intercontinential bandwith is a highly significant and necessary variable (

r = 0.79), which helps to explain both the high number of users per capita in the U.S., U.K., and Japan nexus and the

low levels in African nations. National population density and urbanization also plays a role, with an extremely minor

negative correlation based on population density ( r = -0.06) but a significantly strong one based on urbanization ( r

= 0.73), indicating strong advantages of infrastructure concentration as well as industrialization of agricultural

production - to put blunty, it doesn't matter how many people there is, it's where they are that is important.

[Telegeography Figures 2001: Europe to North America 162 Gbps, North America to Asia 42 Gbps, North America to South

America 14 Gbps, Europe to Asia 1.2 Gbps, North America to Africa 0.8 Gbps, Europe to Africa 0.8?. cited in Kilnam

Chon, "Broadband Networks in Asia", Korean Advanced Institute in Science and Technology, 2002, available at:

asia.stanford.edu/events/fall02/slides/ chonSlides/chonSlides.pdf]

[The North America to Japan international bandwidth connection accounts for 18.03 Gbps, or 42.9% of the total]

[African Internet Connectivity, http://www3.wn.apc.org/africa/afrmain.htm]

There have been some modest attempts to elaborate on this strict data with a degree of ordinal qualitative values. For

example, as mentioned above, Internet access is a very loose term, both in terms of sophistication of use and

international bandwidth. There is also the issue that in many developing nations, access only exists in the capital

cities with little regional connectivity. To account for these and other differences, a model of Internet diffusion

has been developed.[Larry Press, Grey Burkhart, Will Foster, Seymour Goodman, Peter Wolcott, and Jon Woodard, An

Internet Diffusion Framework, Communications of the ACM, Vol. 41, No. 10, pp 21-26, October, 1998.,

http://som.csudh.edu/fac/lpress/articles/acmfwk/acmfrwk.htm]. The methodology uses five ordinal values of

pervasiveness, ranging from 0 (non-existent) to 4 (pervasive), where the number of users per capita increases from a

rate of nil, less than 1 in 1000, 1 in 100 to 1 in 10. A combination of pervasiveness and similar ordinal values

geographical dispersion, sectoral absorption, connnectivity infrastructure, organizational infrasture and finally,

sophistication of use, provide data for diffuseness. Whilst only four nation states are included from the selected

nation-states above, these provide further expected correlations, especially when compared to non-selected

nation-states. However, these figures correlated with the data above; the nation states with the lowest per capita

purchasing power, and the lowest literacy rates had the lowest degress of diffuseness.

Various strategies have been implemented to improve the status of Internet connectivity by the worlds' least-developed

nations, all of which have two common features where successful. Firstly, a strategy of public and community Internet

access rather than individual access. Secondly, a combination of moderate government regulation and commercial

development, especially with foreign investment. The examples used here however, emphasize strategic differences in

terms of government regulation, telecommunications privitization, the involvement of education institutions and

Internet Service Providers. The examples used to emphasize the strategic differences are Peru, Mozambique, China, and

Australia, each representing significantly different attempts to provide Internet access to the population.

Peru's highly urbanized population telecommunications infrastructure development remained poor with the advent of the

Internet in that country. Nevertheless, following an initiative of the Peruvian universities the non-profit Red

Cientifica Peruana (RCP, or Peruvian Scientific Network), with TCP/IP connection established in early 1994, have

established public computer centres throughout Peru with hundreds of thousands of users and with mutual co-ordination

for the common wealth between the RCP, Peruvian telephone companies and international agencies . RCP also manages the

Peru Network Information Center and national backbone and maintains the Peruvian government website. The country has

undergone extraodinarily rapid expansion in the estimated number of users with the number of geographical hosts

increasing from 171 in 1994 to 4,794 in 1998 to 14,611 by July 2002 and a fall in the cost of access from nearly

$40/month in 1996 to $13.73 by late 1999, significantly less expensive than other South American nation-states.

[ David Mangurian, "Internet for the People", IDB America Magazine,

http://www.iadb.org/idbamerica/archive/stories/1997/eng/e11f2.htm, November 1997 see also Red Cientifica Peruna

www.rcp.net.pe]

Another nation which has started with poor connectivity, necessary infrastructure and economic disadvantage is

Mozambique. In 1975, Mozambique had a 97% literacy rate, however two decades of civil war caused it to plummet to a

mere 32.9% by 1994, when Internet connectivity was first established. By the year 2000 there was four main Internet

links with a total bandwidth of 1 088 Kbps. With a highly urbanized population, the Mozambiquean government embarked on

an aggressive telecommunications policy, spending up to five percent of its GDP (one of the highest rates in the

world). With high levels of urbanization and a low telephone density, digital communication lines have been used for

comparative advantage and now make up 95% of all main lines. However, Internet connectivity has been hampered as the

state-owned telecommunications company, TDM was privitized without any potential competitors, becoming a private

monopoly of a public utility. Thus, despite the aggressive and optimistic policy, Internet and telecommunications

connectivity has been largely a failue - by the year 2001, per capita computer stood at 0.0036, and Internet users per

capita stood at 0.0015 with 11 ISPs.

[See: Economic Commission for Africa, Mozambique Country

Profile, 1999, pp215-224

http://www.uneca.org/aisi/nici/country_profiles/Country_documents.htm] and

Keane Shore, Testing Telecentres in Mozambique, International Development Resource Centre, 2000

http://network.idrc.ca/ev.php?URL_ID=5323&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&reload=1057197067

and

Marcel Werner, African Information Society Initiative (AISI) - Case Study: A Critical Examination of the Social,

Economic, Technical and Policy Issues in Mozambique, 1996]

Standing with stark policy contrast to contemporary conventional wisdom, the People's Republic of China is making some

impressive developments in Internet connectivity (matters of content censorship of that connectivity are temporarily

screened for the purpose of this discussion), following the establishment of CANET (China Academic Network) in 1987,

and subsequently ChinaNet, the China Education and Research Network (CERNET) and finally, the first commercial network

developed by the Ministry of Post and Telecommucations (which is also known as ChinaNET, and uses 1953 Mbps of

China's total of 2799 Mbits). With the lowest number of computers per capita in the world according to ITU data (0.05

per 1,000 people compared to the weighted average of 72.38 per 1000 people), China has still managed a reasonably high

degree of Internet use per capita correlated with per capita purchasing power and has a number of Internet Service

Providers per million users is so low that it actually significantly distorts international figures.

A key feature of this development has been government participation in the development of network infrastructure,

commonly referred to as "Gold Projects", representing high proirity proposals. This has led to nation-wide expansion to

the Internet connectivity (including a fifty-city wide Intranet started in 1997) and since May 1996 there has been an

influential and multi-ministerial State Council Steering Committee on National Information Infrastructure (SCSCNII).

The establishment of Internet Service Providers and international gateways which is subject to strict criteria and are

subject to supervision by the Ministry of Post and Telecommunications, the Ministry of Electonic Industries, the State

Education Commission and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

[Richard Cullen and Pinky D W Choy 'The Internet in China' (1999) Columbia Journal of Asian

Law, Vol 13 No 1, 99-134]

With a third highest school "life expentency" in the world, the ninth highest number of Internet users per capita among

the nation-states of the world and, despite it's population, the ninth highest total number of computers, Australia is

known for excellent Internet connectivity and bandwidth in a land of very low population per square kilometre, but high

urbanization. Data networks existed in Australia since the early 1970s through universities and the Commonwealth

Science (CSIRO). In the early 1980s, a permanent Australian email connection to the U.S. APRAnet was established and a

broader University network (South Pacific Education and Research Network) was established during 1985 and 1988 through

the Australian-Vice Chancellor's Committee (AVCC), which developed in the Australian Academic and Research Network

(AARNet).

Commercial networks were established for Internet services at least at early as 1989 (DIALix and Pegasus),

although store and forward bulletin board services and networks were in existence some time prior. In 1995, the AVCC

transferred all commercial customers and assets to the majority-government owned telecommunications company, Telstra,

which was in commercial computing with a private competitor and several large Internet Service Providers (the total

number of I.S.Ps at one stage grew to several hundred, most of which are no longer operating concerns). In 1996, the

registeration of *.com.au domains was granted to Melbourne IT, a commercial body of Melbourne University, which led to

a landslide of registration applications for the *.net.au domain space (which was at that stage gratis, compared to the

$100AUD+ per annum that Melbourne IT was charging) and enormous fluctuations in Melbourne IT's share value. Some

government input continues in a policy direction model through the National Office of the Information Economy, although

its direct input to matters concerning general connectivity remain extremely limited and strictly orientated towards

the needs of the economic subsystem rather than generalizable needs. In early 1999, Australia had 67Gbps

international bandwidth.

[Roger Clarke, A Brief History of the Internet in Australia, Version 3.1 of 5 May 2001

http://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/II/OzIHist.html]

The global data and national examples indicate the degree of international disparity of the Internet from the ideal of

universal access and the continuing dominance of a modernist systematic differentation on the basis of economic

classes. Indeed, realistic concerns are raised that the Internet, whilst providing the promise for a global equality of

discourse chances in form, is actually resulting in new levels of disparity between the "information rich" and the

"information poor". For whilst the correlation between Internet usage per capita and purchasing power per capita

remains extremely strong, this figure is significantly distorted, when one also takes into account bandwidth per user,

user access time, computer capacity and technical competence. In other words, in a world that is increasingly

information dependent, the Internet as it stands, is actually less democratic that the international distribution of

income. Overcoming this problem is within the scope of the recommendations and justifications for this section.

Language and Character Sets

Earlier in this study, a definition of culture was described based on the shared symbolic values of a community of

which language is the most obvious representative. All communities exist in a network of relationships which are

mediated by shared symbolic values, and as such, aspects of the Internet were described and analyzed in terms of a

"virtual community" with additional symbolic values which defines the Internet community as a subculture. This

description of a "subculture" is quite deliberate. There is no fully-fledged "Internet language" rather, there is a

moderate number of appropriate symbolic values which have added to pre-existing cultures. A comparison of ratios

between Internet users by linguistic culture and global distribution is considered here.

Most relevant literature presupposes a dominance of the English language on the Internet. Historically, this is

interpreted through first-nation developmental advantage (specifically the United States of America), the limitations

of character expression from the ASCII code and the relative economic advantage of English in the worldwide economy.

Particularly concerns are expressed with the increasingly globalized world that the advantages of the English language

on the Internet will further enhance the probability of the demise of existing marginal languages, which are already

under threat through lacking initial critical population size and the effects of urbanization, modernization,

migration, economies of scale, and scientific and technically development. Because cultures are symbolically structured

this will equate with the destruction of shared identity. Substantial linguistic opinion estimates widespread

extinction of languages in the coming decades, with some claims that 90% of the worlds languages will be moribund or

extinct by 2100.

[Barbara Grimes and Joseph Grimes (editors), Ethnologue: Languages of the World, 14th Edition, 2 Vols

http://www.ethnologue.com/web.asp]

[Krauss, Michael. 1992. The world's languages in crisis. Language 68(1).1-42]

The following chart confirms some of these assumptions. As per the previous analysis and consistent with the theme of

this chapter, a comparison is made between the idealized potential of the Internet as a global and equal communications

medium and existing reality. In this particular example, the twenty most commonly spoken languages in the world are

utilized for case studies. There is of course, some difficulty here, especially with the Chinese languages which are

mutually intelligible in some written forms even though there are distinctly different in the spoken form (e.g.,

Mandarin, Cantonese and Wu) and multiple scripts (e.g., wen yan, bai hua, pinyin). In addition, Bahasa Malay and Bahasa

Indonesian are considered dialects of the same language here due to a high level of mutual intelligibility rather than

being considered as separate languages (80% cognate), although creole languages (e.g., Haitian French) are not included

as a primary language (but they are as a secondary) as the cognate or lexical similarity is not sufficiently high.

The various national and regional Arabic languages (Arabic Algerian, Arabic Baharna, Arabic Chadian etc) are combined

here despite a lack of mutually intelligibility in the spoken form there is standard Arabic in the written form (with

the excluded exceptions of Judeo-Iraqi, Judeo-Moorocan, Judeo-Tripolitian etc which use the Hebrew script and Maltese

which uses the Romance script).

In total the twenty chosen languages represent the native, first language capacity, of 59.06% of the entire world. This

first language capacity is used to derived percentage of Internet users based on nationality percentages and as a

percentage of the total of Internet users, a similarly derived comparison of world economic output and percentage of

native speakers to world population. Estimations of speaker size are derived from a combination from Ethnologue (with

first language populations of less than 100 000 excluded for ease of calculation) and the Central Intelligence Agency's

World Factbook 2002 and modified percentage of population. Estimations of Internet users and world economy are derived

from estimated speaker size according to national location. These estimations and derivations are based on the best

available data available, and indeed the following table represents the most developed research available on the

Internet and first language use, however as even this data is significantly based on derivations from estimations,

there is certainly no claim to exactness. One area where data could not be collected is variation in literacy rates

between languages within nation-states, although a modicum of research indicates, if not included in this data, that

first-language speakers of imperial languages have higher levels of literacy, control a higher percentage of the

national GDP and have higher levels of Internet access than first-language speakers of indigenous languages.

Language, Speakers 1st (millions), % of world's population, % Literate, Internet Users (millions), % of the Internet

population, GDP, % of Internet, GDP, % of World GDP

World 6233.823, 100.00, 580.78, 100.00, 47000, 100.00

Mandarin, 905.369, 14.52, 82, 38.81, 6.68, 4296, 9.14

English, 357.224, 5.73, 97, 204.42, 35.20, 11263, 23.96

Spanish, 335.996, 5.39, 90, 36.48, 6.28, 3464, 1.76

Hindi, 262.497, 4.21, 53, 1.79, 0.31, 674, 1.43

Arabic, 234.193, 3.76, 57, 6.72, 1.16, 1128, 2.40

Russian, 214.389, 3.44, 98, 15.79, 2.72, 1177, 2.50

Bengali, 206.670, 3.32, 67, 0.65, 0.11, 417, 0.89

Portuguese, 183.372, 2.94, 83, 18.28, 3.15, 1513, 3.22

Japanese, 125.705, 2.02, 55.44, 99, 9.95, 3515, 7.48

Javanese, 108.724, 1.74, 84, 1.85, 0.32, 687, 1.46

Wu, 96.623, 1.55, 82, 3.44, 0.59, 450, 0.96

German, 87.820, 1.41, 98, 33.19, 5.71, 2245, 4.78

Korean, 79.662, 1.28, 98, 25.97, 4.47, 983, 2.09

Cantonese, 76.674, 1.23, 83, 2.78, 0.48, 301, 0.64

Marathi, 73.209, 1.17, 52, 0.49, 0.08, 186, 0.40

Telugu, 74.225, 1.19, 52, 0.5, 0.09, 189, 0.40

Tamil, 71.925, 1.15, 55, 1.13, 0.19, 203, 0.43

French, 69.283, 1.11, 98, 22.02, 3.79, 1815, 3.86

Urdu, 63.811, 1.02, 50, 0.45, 0.08, 156, 0.33

Turkish 54.780, 0.88, 85, 2.09, 0.36, 382, 0.81

[The languages above represent 68.95% of the world economy, 81.32% of world Internet users and 59.06% of first

languages]

The emphasis of the data on first language capacity is quite deliberate in the process of comparison between idealized

possibilities and counterfactual evidence - in the idealized version the Internet would reflect in proportion according

to first language use. This is clearly not the case and indicates a significant disadvantage for all native-language

speakers other than English. However, recent educational studies counter earlier assumptions that first language

acquisition is definitive through brain lateralization (except in the case of pronounciation, with adults maintaining

a degree of first language accent). Educational evidence suggests that post-childhood language aquisition can equate

with at least equivalent and often better performance as those taught a second language prior to adolescence which seem

to be primarily due to other cognitive advantages. There is, of course, an advantage of up to several years however in

first language ability.

[Virginia P. Collier, "The Effect of Age on Acquisition of a Second Language for School", InFocus: Occassional Paper in

Bilingual Education, #2, Winter 1987/88. http://www.ncela.gwu.edu/ncbepubs/classics/focus/02aage.htm]

Research on the content of the Internet by language is slight. One of the few, and often quoted, reports by

vilawood.com is that English makes up 68.4% of total web content, followed by Japanese at 5.9%, German at 5.8%, Chinese

(sic) at 3.9%, French at 3.0%, Spanish at 2.4%, Russian at 1.9%, Italian at 1.6%, Portuguese at 1.4%, Korean at 1.3%

and all other languages constituting 1.3%. Even assuming that official languages are widespread as second languages the

slight increases that this provides to the imperial languages of English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese still does

not override the overwhelming and disproportionate dominance of English as the language of the Internet, with Japanese,

German, French, Spanish, and Italian also having notable disproportionate content.

[cf., Global Internet Statistics: Sources and References http://www.glreach.com/globstats/refs.php3, Global Reach,

2002]

These features are, of course, relevant to the historical context of the Internet. The dominance of native English

speakers, the historical origins of the Internet, the geographical access to bandwidth and per capita access to

computers and the high levels of literacy in English-speaking nations all have played an important role in the existing

and continuing dominance of the English language on the Internet. Other important features include the technical

dominance of the ASCII character code and the general efficiency of the Latin-1 language script (ISO 8859-1), with

alternative scripts historically subject to a bewildering array of incompatiable extensions and alternative encodings

to the ASCII character set.

A particularly pertinient example are the problems associated with the various Chinese languages, input methods and

encoding. The People's Republic of China and the province of Taiwan already represent a significant percentage of

Internet users and the proportion of users is likely to increase. However, the logographic style of the Chinese

language (also employed in Korean and Japanese as Hanja and Kanji script respectively) is problematic for computer

mediated communication. Multiple input methods for logographic scripts have been developed according by encoding,

pronounciation and character structure (with pinyin representing a romanization encoding input method). In part this

has been assisted by the transition from wen yan (traditional) to bai hua (simplified) scripts and greatly assisted by

the adoption of pinyin romance scripts, although this script does not have the high degree of compatiability that the

traditional and simplified scripts have across different languages.

Political non-cooperation on the technical level has also hampered the development of the Chinese languages on the

Internet. The Province of Tawain, Republic of China, adopted the Dawu Ma, or Big5 encoding set in the mid-1980s. This

character set sorts strokes according to frequency and stroke count and finally by including radicals. Hong Kong

adopted the character encoding method in 1995 as the "Government Chinese Character Set" with additional Catonese

characters added in 1999. In comparison the People's Republic of China and Singapore have adopted the Guojia Biazhun Ma

encoding set. In the recent past, other character encoding sets such as CCII (used for Taiwanese library systems),

Chinese Windows 95 etc were also in common use.

[Stephen J. Searle, "A Brief History of Character Codes in North America, Europe and East Asia, Sakamura Laboratory,

University of Tokyo, 1999 http://tronweb.super-nova.co.jp/characcodehist.html]

The story and difficulties of the Chinese character sets is not unfamiliar. Project Gutenberg, founded in 1971 and

based on the proposition "it would be a really good idea if lots of famous and important texts were freely available to

everyone in the world", has attempted to fulfil its objective by insisting first and foremost on plain ASCII text

files. However the range of competing variations on ASCII text has substantially skewed the provision of non-English

language material. As of July 2003, there were only six Bulgarian texts, sixty-four Chinese, eight Dutch, five Flemish

one hundred and two French, one hundred and eighty three German, one Greek, thirteen Italian, two Japanese, fifteen

Latin, three Portuguese, fifteen Spanish, one Swedish and four Welsh texts. This compares to circa nine thousand five

hundred English language texts. In terms of character sets, the Bulgarian Epicheski pesni (Epical Songs), Slaveikov,

Pencho, uses the Cyrillic Windows 1251 character set and Legge's Confucian Analects requires the Big 5 character set.

[cd Project Gutenberg http://www.pg.net]

With a range of propriertory variations existing for a number of national character sets as expansions to the ASCII

character code, the International Standards Organization began an attempt of standardization with the development of

the ISO 8859 family of codes which included western, eastern, southern and northern European Latin scripts, Cryrillic,

Arabic, Greek, Hebrew, Turkish and Nordic, with later standards added for Thai and Celtic. These provided the first

registered Internet character sets for use with MIME. More recently ISO/IEC 10646 establishes an international standard

which defines UCS, a Universal Character Set. This standard is being implemented as Unicode, which takes the more

abstract standards of ISO/IEISO 10646 and imposes additional constraints to ensure that characters are treated the same

across different operating systems and hardware platforms with unique and unambigious expressions.

Established as a non-profit organization in 1991 and consisting of mainly U.S. software manufacturers (Xerox, Apple,

I.B.M., Microsoft, Novell, Sun, Next etc) the implementation of has had some difficulty. The original standard, Unicode

v1.0 was voted down as incompatiable by the ISO. It wasn't until 1993 that a standard acceptable to ISO/IEC 10646 was

confirmed. Version 2.0 (Chinese ideogaphs) was released in 1996, and version 3.0 (support for Braille, Canadian

Aboriginal Syllabics, Cherokee, Ethiopic, Khmer, Mongolian, Myanmar, Ogham, Runic, Sinhala, Syriac, Thaana, Yi) in

2000. Significant problems still exist with the number of allocation pipeline, terminal compatiability, the continued

use of proprietory standards and transformation formats. Currently the UTF-8 transmission format is considered the best

standard to the point that the Internet Mail Consortium considers that:

"All mail-displaying programs created or revised after January 1, 1999, must be able to display mail that uses the

UTF-8 charset. Another way to say this is that any program created or revised after January 1, 1999, that cannot

display mail using the UTF-8 charset should be considered deficient and lacking in standard internationalization

capabilities."

[Internet Mail Consortium, "Using International Characters in Internet Email", Internet Mail Consortium, 1998,

http://www.imc.org/mail-i18n.html]

The problem of character encoding has also affected the implementation of top-level domain names which are, as of July

2003, entirely expressed in the Latin-1 (i.e., English) character. This however this seems to be changing in the very

near future. In late 2000, Verisign, the company that manages the .com and .net domain names, began including

multilingual website names for second level domains, initially using Chinese, Japanese and Korean characters. However,

this was without a universal encoding standard and drew criticism from Internet standards organizations including the

Internet Society and the Internet Engineering Task Force who described the actions as "premature under the technical

standards of the Internet". Notably, Verisign's own frequently asked questions list on the issue does not use a

character code to represent a Chinese character in it's example, but rather an image file.

[

Michael Astor (AP), Non-English Domain Names Coming Soon on the Internet, March 2003

http://www.whois.sc/news/2003-03/non-english.html.

Todd Weiss, Testing of Multilingual Domain Names Set To Begin, Computerworld.com, November 9, 2000

http://www.computerworld.com/developmenttopics/websitemgmt/story/0,10801,53652,00.html

and

http://www.verisign.com/nds/naming/idn/faq/general_faq.html]

Enablement: Technical and Physical Limitations

Whilst physical connectivity and shared symbolic values form part of the capacity for universal access recognition must

be also provided for different degrees of physical ability among human beings themselves. Technology, as a whole,

enables people to perform tasks which are normally beyond their natural ability - such as engage in communication with

people on the other sound of the world - however technologies also tend to be fairly selective in their scope of

enablement. An indication of the degree of advancement of a particular technology is the degree of transparency, that

is the degree that the capacity of the technology is transparent to the varied physical abilities of the user. As an

idealized proposition of universal access, computer-mediated communication to the Internet is counterfactually stated

as regardless of physical capacity to use the technology, that is, the technology is fully transparent. Whilst this

ultimately would be a form of computer-mediated telepathic communication, the degree of exclusiveness due to technical

limitations must be stated.

Following the semantic of Perry, Macken and Israel, disability in this context, means the loss of functional ability

that is part of the species-specific standard. A handicap is the inability to perform some task according to the

species-specific standard. There is usually a strong correlation between disability and handicap, although

circumstantial disabilities and handicaps differ from intrinsic disabilities and handicaps. The former recognizes that

all human beings are dependent on their cultural artefacts to perform particular tasks. These artefacts have differing

degress of enablement (or none at all) for different people. "Disabled people, like everyone else, are handicapped in

the absence of structures and tools that enable them to perform the tasks they want to do". Actions are defined as the

property if agents, of which acts are the particular examples and are subclassified accordingt to their properties as

executions (the type of non-circumstantial movement) and accomplishments, with regards to the results. To cover the

full range of disabilities, accomplishments change the internal circusmtances of an agent through enablement, the

infrastructure provided at a location in order to perform certain goals.

[John Perry, Elizabeth Macken, David Israel "Prolegomena to A Theory of Disability, Inability and Handicap December 13,

1998. Published in Logic, Language and Computation, vol. 2, edited by Larry Moss, Jonathan Giznburg and Maarten de

Rijke. Stanford: CSLI Publications, 1999.]

The number of people who have variance form the species standard is difficult to determine as different nation states

use different standards. For example, an Australian survey of 1993 lists seven criteria for identification including

any degree of loss of sight, hearing, learning difficulties, emotional conditions, or disfigurement or deformities.

Under this criteria some 18% of the population could be classified as disabled in some manner, with strong correlation

according to age (Total 18.0%, 0-14 years 7.0%, 15-59 years 13.6%, 60 plus years 50.9%) and with slightly more women

than men with that condition. With slightly stronger criteria (e.g., "serious difficulty seeing, even when wearing

glasses or contact lenses?" but also including "Is X frequently depressed or anxious?") a 1994 survey from the United

States of America also confirmed a strong correlation between age and disability (total 15.0%, 15-59 years 11.9%, 60+

years 38.2%). In comparison, a less developed country like Bangladesh took significantly stronger definitions. A 1982

survey asked whether people were blind, crippled, deaf and dumb or mentally handcapped. Under this criteria, 0.8%

percent of the population fitted these criteria. Brazil, with strong definitions but also noting classifications

according to sex, age and location (rural/urban) slightly more women than men were disabled, slightly more rural than

urban and again, with strong correlation on the basis of age (total 0.9%, 0-14 years 0.4%, 15-59 0.9%, 60+ years 2.7%).

These general percentages and correlations are also confirmed by studies from Japan, India, Italy, Nigeria, Pakistan,

the United Kingdom.

[Source material:

United Nations Statistics Division, Disability Statistics - Available Studies

http://unstats.un.org/unsd/disability/

Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics, Disabled population of Bangladesh, Evidence from Demographic Sample Survey (1987).

Fundacao Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estastistica - IBGE, Censo Demografico, 1991, Caracteristicas Gerais da

Populacao e Instrucao, No. 1 (1996).

Census of India, 1981 - Series 1, Part VII-B - The Physically Handicapped, 1981.

Instituto Nazionale di Statistica, Tavole Disabili per un’ Indagine Condizione di Salute e Ricorso ai Servizi

Sanitari Anno 1994.

Statistics Division, 1981 Census Report of Pakistan, 1984.

National Population Commission, 1991 Population Census of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, Analytical Report at the

National Level (1998).

Office of Population Censuses and Surveys, 1991 Census, Report for Great Britain (Part 1), Vol. 3 of 3 (1993).

United States Department of Health and Human Services, National Center for Health Statistics, Vital and Health

Statistics, Current Estimates from the National Health Interview Survey, 1994, Series 10, No. 193 (1995).

Statistisches Bundesamt Wiesbaden, Stichproberhebung uber die Bevolkerung und den Arbeitsmarkt (Population and Labour

Market Survey), 1992.

United Nations, Demographic Yearbook 1991, Special Issue: Population Ageing and the Situation of Elderly Persons

(1993).

]

In general, it would appear that approximately 1% of the population has a severe degree of disability which would

handicap their ability to use the Internet with standard existing input/output devices. Furthermore approximately 10%

appear to have a moderate degree of disability based on input/output standards. These figures are approximately a half

for severe levels of disability and a third for moderate levels of disability based on the ages 0-14 (presumably severe

disabilities don't often improve with age) and tripled for the 60+ aged group (both severe and moderate). The ration

according to sex appears to be equal. Variation according to national economic development is difficult to ascertain

due to competing standards used by particular nation-states with less developed countries only recording severe

levels of disability, whereas more developed countries record disabilties in less severe degrees and occassionally

including subjective disabilities in addition to those which physical and neurological origins.

In comparison to the normal input/output peripherals for the species-norm, a variety of alternative peripherals are

being developed or have been developed to assist in enablement. For the visually impaired for exampe there are screen

readers and speech synthesizers (audio output), Braille printers, large format/contrasting text software and larger

than standard monitors. Those with mobility limitations may also be aided by keyboard macros, sequential keyboard

rather than simultaneous input (e.g., shift-key options), remapped keyboards and speech-recognition software. The

hearing and speech impaired are significantly enabled by computer mediated communication which places their capacity on

an near-equal level to fellow users. For example, a number of operating systems utilize system warnings through audio

output. These are optionally replaced by visual markers. Recently a number of companis have actually provided

technologies which provide "hands free" computer access through head movement alone replace the functions of the mouse,

mouse buttons and keyboard. Others have gone a step further with eye-tracking systems with although it is clear that

the technology still requires further development.

[

John Cookson, Lloyd Rasmussen, and George Stockton Center On Disabilities, "Talking Books: Toward A Digital

Model", Technology And Persons With Disabilities Conference 1997, California State Univeristy Northbridge

http://www.csun.edu/cod/conf/1997/proceedings/csun97_032.htm

Dinah F. B. Cohen, Ophelia Y. Falls, "Technical Acccommadation Assistive Technologies in the Work Place, Technology And

Persons With Disabilities Conference 1997, California State Univeristy Northbridge,

Randy Marsden, "100% Hands-free Computer Acess - Madentec's 2000 Series, Persons With Disabilities Conference 2000,

California State Univeristy Northbridge,

http://www.csun.edu/cod/conf/2000/proceedings/0185Marsden.htm

Barbara Phillips, Bruce Fleming, Andy Lin, "Eye Tracking Technology: A Comparative Study", Persons With Disabilities

Conference 2001, California State Univeristy Northbridge,

http://www.csun.edu/cod/conf/2001/proceedings/0055phillips.htm

]

Another example of enablement is the introduction of sound output and input systems. As an output system proposed

digitization of sound would supplement obsolescent technologies (e.g., "talking books" on analogue cassettes). Sound,

of course, takes up substantially more bandwidth than text in a digital format: a twelve hours of spoken audio material

requires at least 3 gigabytes of digital storage space. A cooperative attempt by commercial producers to ensure

interoperability has led to the formation of the DAISY (Digital Accessible Information SYstem) Consortium, orginating

in Sweden in 1996 and with international membership from Japan, Spain, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands. It is a

recognized ANSI standard and is based on a number of recommendations from the World Wide Web Consortium to ensure

compliance with Extensible Markup Language (XML) and the Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL) standards.

The DAISY standard allows users to navigate and place bookmarks according to chapter, section, page breaks, or images.

[The DAISY Consortium http://www.daisy.org/]

The importance of complaince with World Wide Web Consortium standards for disabled people has been an issue for a

number of years. The W3C has been establishing standards to promote a high degree of accessibility through the Web

Accessibility Initiative (WAI) which has been included in the official html and xhtml standards. However, only a tiny

percentage of websites follow these standards as they do not carry any regulative weight and because different browsers

interpret html code differently - with a commercial imperative to placing an emphasis on being "forgiving" to poorly

structured code. For disabled people, this lack of quality is frustrating as many websites are inaccessible to them

which led the French Braillenet, a member of the WAI, to launch a campaign in 1998 for improved accessibility. The

importance of such campaigns is not to be underestimated. As multimedia becomes more of a feature of the World Wide Web

the tendancy for webdesigners to design pages which are inaccessible to the visually impaired and other disabled people

increases. The modular structure of the Extensible Hypertext Mark-Up Language (xhtml) compared to html ensures

disability access if the standards are implemented.

[

Sylvie Duchateau, Dominique Archambault, Dominique Berger, "A Campaign in France for a more accessible Web", Persons

With Disabilities Conference 2000, California State Univeristy Northbridge,

http://www.csun.edu/cod/conf/2000/proceedings/0162Duchateau.htm

Kynn Bartlett, Beyond HTML: Web Accessibility for the 21st Century, Persons With Disabilities Conference 2003

http://www.csun.edu/cod/conf/2003/proceedings/76.htm

]

According to species-specific norms, the Internet and computer mediated communication provide a high degree of

enablement to communication and information retrieval. To a number of differently abled people, these advantages remain

true, for example, the mobility impaired are able to engage in a significant degree of reflexive labour which would in

many cases involve substantial difficulties (travel, building access etc), which also exists for those people who have

socially based phobias, although the technology may also contribute to these problems as much as it provides a means of

mediating them. Potential exists for technical enablement for other disabilities and becomes more pertinient as the

economic distribution of labour becomes more dependent on computer skills and the possibility of Internet services

becoming less accessible due to multimedia elaborations implemented in a truncuated manner is likely. Such negative

trajectories can only be curtailed by the adoption of cooperative and regulative standards; the current experience of

voluntary adoption does not suggest that organizations will be sensitive to the needs of those with differing

abilities.

Access Distortions: The Digital Divide

The first three examples refer to limitations to the counterfactual ideal of universal access to the Internet on the

basis of physical access prohibitions (i.e., geographic connectivity, native language and character set use, physical

disability). This section concentrates on distortions to the ideal where there is no physical reason per se, but rather

due to systematic limitations and structural affects from social systems as they apply to particular social groups,

that is, gender distortions, age groups, ethnicity, and income brackets. Whilst many reviewers and organizations (most

notably the Benton Foundation) refer to the entirety of technological bias as the "digital divide", it is used in a

more specialized sense here where access is technologically available, technologically possible and yet distribution of

access remains strongly distorted. A particular emphasis is placed here on providing some semblance of empirical

measures of these distortions, despite the lack of consistent data collection.

[e.g., Digital Divide Basics Fact Sheet, Digital Divide Network Staff, Benton Foundation, 2001?

http://www.digitaldividenetwork.org/content/stories/index.cfm?key=168]

Evaluating structural distortions is never an easy task, but it is made additionally difficult due to variations in

national evaluation methods and abritrary and ambigious classifications. Gender distortions is perhaps the easiest and

least ambigious classification as it represents social distortions that arise from the social experience of biological

sex - although biological divergence from this exists as well, in the case of Turner's Syndrome (chromosone 45,

consitution XO), which are nominally defined as 'female' and Klinefelter's Sydrome (chromosone 47, constition XXY or

less commonly XXX). There are other, less common variations such as 48, XXYY; 48, XXXY; 49, XXXXY and XY/XXY mosaic.

All of these are considered Klinefelter Syndrome variants. Whilst representing in total perhaps 1 in 500 individuals it

is doubtful whether widespread social statistical information will be collected on such people in the immediate future.

Similar problems arise with other criteria which are likewise could be considered biological in one sense, but also

have socially defined values. In the differentiation of age, a strict biological classification exists between child

and adult which has variation according to chronological age, but also with the additional systematic classification of

'citizen' and 'minor' in a legal-political sense, and with an additional cultural concept of adolescence which is

associated with young adulthood. Likewise with the notion of the 'elderly', which is in some instances evaluated by an

abritrary chronological age and in some instances based on the systematically defined chronological ages of retirement

from the labour force.

Ethnicity is perhaps the least precise of all the social classifications that have a semblance of a biological basis.

As there are no members of the species homo sapiens which are geographically circumscribed and have distinctive

features, the biological and taxonomic classification of race and subspecies within humans has been discounted in

favour of different frequencies of physical traits with variation as clines to the point of exactness where

contemporary genetics can determine the likely broad geographical ancestry of an individual based on an aggregation of

individual physical traits. In comparison, ethnicity is a multifaceted concept that includes linguistic, religious,

nationality, genetic and self-identification within a larger social unit, whether systematic or cultural.

[Luigi Cavalli-Sfroza, Paolo Menozzi, Alberto Piazza, History and Geography of Human Genes, Princeton University Press,

1994.

D.E. Crews, and J.R. Bindon. 1991. Ethnicity as a taxonomic tool in biomedical and biosocial research. Ethnicity

and Disease, 1:42-49. abstract available at: http://www.as.ua.edu/ant/bindon/ethnicit.htm

]

Despite these difficulties, some attempt can be made to derive empirical data. As per the initial sectional

description, the use of large nation-state criteria and income levels is used for as the operating level for

comparisons. Included within this is purchasing power per capita and gini index, followed by literacy (total, male,

female), Labour Force (millions), Labour Force (percantage of population), Unemployment rate (labourforce) workforce

composition (male, female), female/male ratio (females per 100 males, 1997), legal code (semi-traditional (s),

civil/common (c)), their human rights index (based on The Observer), whether they are a signatory to UN Convention on

the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women, Women (CEDAW, defined by signature (s), ratification (r),

accession (a) or succession (s)), chronological age percentage (above 65, below 15), and finally, given the extreme

variation in the definition of 'ethnicity', presented as the percentage of the population who are native in a language

other than official languages.

Nation-state, Legal System, Purchasing Power Per Capita, Gini Index, Literacy (T/M/F), Labour Force %, Unemployment

Rate, Workforce (M/F), CEDW, Aged Population, Youth Population, Nonofficial Language

U.S.A., c, 8.5, $36300, 41, 97%/97%/97%, 51%, 5%, na, 103, s, 13%, 21%, 11%

Japan, c, 6.0, $28000, 25, 99%/na/na, 53%, 5.4%, na, 104, s, 18%, 14%, 1%

Germany, c, 1.0, $26600, 30, 99%/na/na, 50%, 9.8%, 9.1%, na, 104, s, 16%, 16%, 8%

France, c, 2.5, $25700, 33, 99%/99%/99%, 44%, 9.1%, na, 105, s, 16%, 19%, 6%

United Kingdom, c, 3.5, $25300, 37, 99%/na/na, 50%, 5.2%, na, 104, s, 16%, 19%, 3%

Italy, c, 2.0, $25200, 27, 98%/na/na, 41%, 9.1%, na, 106, s, 19%, 14%, 56%

Mexico, c, 11.0, $9000, 52, 90%/92%/87%, 38%, 3%, 72%/28%, 102, s, 5%, 33%, 21%

Russia, c, 8.5, $8800, 40, 98%/100%/97%, 49%, 8%, na, s, 13%, 18%, 19%

Brazil, s, 8.0, $7400, 59, 83%/83%/83%, 45%, 6%, 72%/28%, 102, s, 6%, 30%, 2%

Turkey, c, 13.0, $7000, 42, 85%/94%/77%, 35%, 10.8%, 66%/34%, 98, a, 6%, 30%, 20%

Thailand, c, 8.0, $6600, 41, 94%/96%/92%, 54%, 3.9%, 56%/44%, 100, a, 6%, 24%, 6%

China, s, 18.5, $4600, 40, 82%/90%/73%, 55%, 10%, 57%/43%, 94, s, 7%, 23%, 30%

Phillipines, s, 11.5, $4000, 46, 95%/95%/94%, 38%, 10%, 69%/31%, 99, s, 4%, 37%, 74%

Egypt, s, 21.0, $3700, 29, 51%/64%/39%, 29%, 12%, 90%/10%, 97, s, 4%, 36%, 2%

Indonesia, s, 20.5, $3000, 32, 84%/90%/78%, 43%, 8%, 69%/31%, 100, s, 5%, 31%, 90%

India, c, 15.0, $2540, 38, 52%/66%/38%, 39%, 8.8%, 76%/24%, 94, s, 4%, 36%, 31%

Pakistan, s, 19.0, $2100, 31, 43%/55%/29%, 27%, 6.3%, 87%/13%, 94, a, 4%, 42%, 82%

Vietnam, s, 9.0, $2100, 36, 94%/96%/91%, 47%, 25%, 53%/47%, 103, s, 6%, 31%, 13%

Bangladesh, s, 7.0, $1750, 34, 63%/49%/56%, 48%, 35%, 59%/41%, 95, a, 3%, 40%, 2%

Nigeria, s, 12.0, $840, 51, 57%/67%/47%, 66, 65%/35%, 51%, 28%, s, 3%, 44%, 36%

[Data from the CIA World Factbook 2002, the Summer Institute of Linguistics Ethnologue, the United Nations Division for

the Advancement of Women. The Human Rights Index is based on the 'simple index' as defined by The Observer Human Rights

Index 1999 (http://www.guardian.co.uk/rightsindex/0,2759,201749,00.html), which calculates the incidence of 10 headline

abuses (extrajudicial killings, disappearances, torture, deaths in custody, prisoners of conscience, unfair trail,

detention without charge, executions, death sentences, abuses by armed opposition groups) that gives a score that

relates to the intensity of the abuses in each country. Division of labour figures are based on the United Nations

Population Information Network, United Nations Population Reference Bureau 2002]

The strong correlation between income and Internet connective has been previously noted (r=0.96). Related income

information is the moderate correlation between labour force participation and connectivity (r=0.39) and the negative

correlation with unemployment (r=-0.37). The relationship between human rights abuses and connectivity is strongly

negative (r=-0.64). There is a negative correlation with non-official first language speakers (r=-0.31)

Gender distortions to the counterfactual ideal of universal access to the Internet have had a significant history.

Recent changes in advanced nations have reached the point where some commentators claim that "[t]]here is little reason

for concern about sex inequalities in Internet access and usage now, but gender differences in frequency and intensity

of Internet usage remain". Such claims, whilst being somewhat appropriate for technologically and systematically

advanced nations which accord egalitarian rights to men and women in legal norms, education and to a lesser degree

income, do not take into consideration existing systematic restrictions on the rights of women in less developed

countries, where there are significant disparaties in literacy, legal rights (especially family law), labour force

participation and income.

[Hiroshi Ono, Madeline Zavodny, No 495 in Working Paper Series in Economics and Finance from Stockholm School of Economics

available at: http://econpapers.hhs.se/paper/hhshastef/0495.htm]

[For examples of differentiation of legal rights Bangladesh, Egypt and Pakistan's signatures to CEDAW made reservations

on the basis of Islamic religious law. c.f., Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against

Women, Adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations on 18 December 1979, United Nations, Treaty Series, vol.

1249, p. 13. ]

Nevertheless, positive changes and positive participation cannot be ignored. A survery of World Wide Web users

conducted by the Graphic Vizualization and Usability Center (GUV) at Georgia Tech University has witnessed an increase

of women survey participants from 6% in 1994 to 39% in 1997. According to a Nielsen Netratings survey, over 50% of

Internet users are women, over 45% in Mexico, just under 40% in France, Italy and Brazil and 36.6% in Germany.

According to a recent report in the South China Morning Post, the number of women using the Internet in the Asia

Pacific region increased increased by 36% in the six month period between January and July 2001. In Africa, it is

estimated that women make up 37.5% of the Internet population in Zambia, 31.5% in Uganda, but down to 19.0% in South

Africa, 13.0% in Ethiopia and 12.0% in Senegal.

[

c.f.,http://www.nielsennetratings.com/press_releases/PDF/pr_010725.pdf also reported

http://www.nua.ie/surveys/index.cgi?f=VS&art_id=905357021&rel=true

South China Morning Post: Online gender split evens up in Asia, http://technology.scmp.com/ZZZDG8QXJOC.html also

reported at:

http://www.nua.ie/surveys/index.cgi?f=VS&art_id=905356940&rel=true

Gender, Information Technology and the Digital Divide in Africa, March 28th, 2001, EDIT

]

With regards to age groups, recent research from the Forrester Group suggests that some 20% of European seniors

(defined as over 55) have Internet access, which includes 50% of those in Sweden, 40% in the Netherlands, and 29% in

the United Kingdom. Yet this research is contradicted by that conducted by NetValue which suggests that seniors in the

U.K. account for 13% of their online population with only Sweden (17.4%) and Denmark (16.3%) having a greater

percentage (the aged account for 16% of the population in the United Kingdom). In the United States, research from

Jupiter Communications claims that the greatest divide for being online is age and income, estimating that between 2000

and 2005, the percentage of seniors (defined as 50-plus years) will increase from 16% to 48%, whilst children (ages

2-12) will increase from 32 percent to 62%, whereas Nielsen Netratings also conducted in 2002 claim that children and

young adults make up 20% of the U.S. Internet population and a Pew Internet and American life report in 2001 claimed

that 73% of U.S. teenagers use the Internet. This high proportion for advanced nation states is reflected a significant

cultural shift: a study by NOP research indicates that 60% of children in the United Kingdom know that a homepage is

the first page of a website, yet only 9% know what a preface to a book is. Finally, there is a notable lack of

demographic research available concerning Internet access and age differentiation from middle and developing nations.

[

http://www.nua.ie/surveys/index.cgi?f=VS&art_id=905355848&rel=true

Jupiter Communications: Income & Age Are Largest Gap in Digital Divide

http://www.nua.ie/surveys/index.cgi?f=VS&art_id=905358261&rel=true

Nielsen NetRatings: IM programs draw US kids and teens online

http://www.nielsen-netratings.com/

http://www.nua.ie/surveys/index.cgi?f=VS&art_id=905356905&rel=true,

http://www.pewinternet.org/reports/toc.asp?Report=36

Pew Internet & American Life: Internet part of daily life for teens

http://www.nua.ie/surveys/index.cgi?f=VS&art_id=905355157&rel=true, Nua Ltd: Meeting Generation Y

http://www.nua.ie/surveys/index.cgi?f=VS&art_id=905358419&rel=true, BBC Online Network: Kids know more about Internet

than books, Oct 04 2002]

All only available research in the studies of ethnic variation within nation-states is from the United States which

invariably uses a combination of arbritrary and subjective racial classifications, cultural clasifications and

geographical differentiations (e.g., "black" Americans, "white" Americans, "Hispanics", "Natives", "Asian"

Americans). According to the methodology used by the U.S. census, "whites" constitute 77.1%, "blacks" 12.9%, Asians

4.2% and Natives 1.8%. "Hispanics" are combined within the other groups ("black Hispanics", "white" Hispanics, "Asian"

Hispanics" etc). Spanish is the first language of an estimated 9% of the U.S. population. Within these ambigious and

subjective definitions, an estimated 5% of the online U.S. nation are Afro-Americans according to comScore Media

Matrix, whereas a Pew Internet and American Life report claims that fifty percent of adult Hispanics use the Internet

whereas as a Cyberdialogue report released the same month claims 32% have Internet access. Pew also reports that over

2/3rds of Asian Americans use the Internet every day.

Consistent research shows the strongest correlation of the of the digital divide can be evaluated according to the

differences in income. Part of this has already been confirmed by the correlation coefficients between Internet access,

national per capita income and the Gini co-efficient. However within nation-states this is further confirmed. The

Jupiter Communications report "Assessing the Digital Divide", noted that less than half of U.S. households with a

income of less than $15 000 (19% of the population) would be Internet users by 2005. This is confirmed with the

consistent adoption of new related technologies; by September 2002, Leitchman Research was reporting that nearly 30% of

households with incomes over $100 000 had broadband access whereas only 4% of households with an income level of less

than $35 000 and further, with 85% of $100 000-plus income households having home connectivity, compared with 30% of

those households with income levels below $35 000. Further, this divide in increasing, not falling with Nielsen

Netratings reporting that even now, those with income levels between $100 000 and $150 000 are the fastest growing

demographic group (a 20% increase), and those with income levels above $150 000 as the second fastest growing

demographic group (a 14% increase). Those in households earning less than $25 000 per annum or between $25 000 to $50

000 grew by 2% and 5% respectively. This data is further confirmed from research in Japan in November 2000, where

survey conducted by Nikkei Business Publications showed that 49.4% of those with annual incomes over 10 million yen

($93 000 USD) were Internet users, an increase of 9.9% frm that March, whereas only 11% of those with incomes of less

than 3.5 million yen ($32 500 USD) were online, an increase of only 0.5%.

[Digital Divide More Economic than Ethnic, CyberAtlas, June 15, 2000

http://cyberatlas.internet.com/big_picture/demographics/article/0,,5901_395581,00.html

http://www.nua.com/surveys/index.cgi?f=VS&art_id=905358462&rel=true

Nielsen NetRatings: Wealthy Americans get online

Oct 16 2002: Affluent Americans are the fastest growing income group online, according to Nielsen Netratings.

AsiaBizTech: Japan's digital divide is getting wider

Nov 10 2000:

http://www.nikkeibp.asiabiztech.com/wcs/leaf?CID=onair/asabt/resch/116508

http://www.nua.ie/surveys/index.cgi?f=VS&art_id=905356162&rel=true

]

Recommendations

The history of the technological mediation of information has been a history of owning the resources for the production

of technologically mediated information and the rule of privileged political rank and economic class. This remains true

even for most modern electronic communication systems where there is a significant requisite capital disparity between

technology for producing and transmitting information and technology for receiving information (e.g., television and

radio). Only with the telephone is the a degree of equality between participants, both in terms of the capacity to

transmit and receive, and for that reason the differentiation between technologically mediated information and

technologically mediated communication holds true.

The Internet however, has far greater potential than the telephone. Like the telephone it is a communications medium

where technological capacity to communicate requires capital equivalence (although communication failure occurs when

the user with greater capacity attempts to send information to a user with lesser capacity). As a substantial

improvement, it allows asynchronous communication. The multimedia capacity combines the capabilities of print media, of

telephonic media and of televised media. Add to this the computerized aspect of file storage and calaculative capacity

in a machines that are increasingly portable and with increasing storage and calculative capacity and the net result is

a qualitative transformative technology where the counterfactual ideal of universal access, universal participation and

universal communication is within the realm of the pragmatically achievable.

Yet the comparison with the empirical data available indicates that this is from the case. The enormous global

disparities that exist on the basis of the international and national distribution of income, access to bandwidth,

literacy, language and encoding standards, individual disabilities, political exclusion and cultural-systematic

distortions (gender, ethnicity, age) indicates that in many cases the Internet is less democratic that these currently

existing dispararities. The strongest example of this is the relationship with where disparaties in technological

capacity are far greater than the disparities in income, again a function of a technology whose capacity doubles every

two years.

Proposing recommendations to alleviate these disparities so that the Internet and computerized mediated communications

are orientated towards the ideal of universal access is often outside the scope of the study. For example, the

strongest correlation to Internet accessibility is that with per capita purchasing power. It serves little purpose to

elaborate on strategies for social systems to increase this, although two general methods can be noted, one destructive

and one productive. The former requires an orientation towards rent-seeking, whereby income is derived without adding

to production. The latter requires capital and technological investment whereby the productive capacity and marginal

cost per unit is reduced. The same general statement also applies to the positive correlations on labour force

participation and the negative correlations with unemployment and the Gini coefficient. Likewise with urbanization -

the infrastructure costs of providing Internet access to a disparate population is self-evident. Urbanization

positively correlates with accessibility which however, can only be achieved along with a mechanization of agricultural

techniques. Similar comments can be made concerning non-official language speakers: a political system can either

enforce to exclude non-native official language speakers from it's boundaries or increase the number of official

languages. The choice in a globalized and interconnected world should be obvious.

Rather, more formal and directed recommendations for universal access are applied here. Requisites for universal access

include universal political rights, bandwidth capacity (national and international), competence in literacy,

operational skills and access to the technological medium. The provision of these rights, goods and services has been

in all post-primitive societies largely a matter of the social system, rather than an integrated whole of the social

system and the cultural lifeworld. Under such criteria, the question becomes what sort of model should be applied and

what sort of strategic intervention is required, of which two extreme models commonly enunciated is governmental

organizations (systematic steering through power) or commercial organizations (systematic steering through exchange)

with additional tensions between democratic (egalitarian, anarchist) and hierarchial (profit, power) orientations.

These are inevitable tensions between these two organizational models and orientations which are not elaborated here:

rather the recommendations are solely orientated towards the objective of universal access.

The economics of public utilities is well understood. It is defined as an organization whose services are deemed

essential and necessary to the entirety of the population without discrimination as public infrastructure. The decision

to "deem" a particular service as "essential and necessary" is of course often a political one as much as it is a act

of rational strategic intervention, and often elements are introduced as public utilities which add stresses to the

political and economic subsystems. This does not make the goods or services a fully public good, whereby a good is

non-exclusive and for which the marginal costs of additional consumption is zero nor necessarily a private good,

whereby beneficiaries can be charged without any difficulty and whereby the marginal cost of a good is positive and at

least as great as the average cost. The matter is further complexified by the economic systematic objective (and model

assumption) of universally accessible information and knowledge for rational decision-making; the degree that an

economic system does not much the assumed model is axiomatically the degree that economic planning will be erroneous.

[For a theoretical treatment of the politicization of the market and public goods cf., Claus Offe, Disorganized

Capitalism: Contemporary Transformations of Work and Politics, Polity Press, 1985.]

Taking these matters into consideration, it is strongly recommended that the political subsystem intervenes into the

economic subsystem to ensure the provision of sufficient Internet bandwidth on the basis of population needs rather

than profitability (with the previous comments concerning the efficiency of urbanization accounted for a priori). The

provision of bandwidth, both in the physical and wireless variety, is a public utility whose widespread implementation

not only enhances democratic communication between members of a society, but also provides the opportunity for greater

satisfaction of the axioms of the economic market. The actual purchase and implementation of the necessary hardware

(the laying of cables, the establishment of access point towers etc) is of course a matter of contractual competition

between commercial organizations, however the grid, the network itself, should remain public property available for

private lease on a non-profit basis (as the network itself is a virtual monopoly). From this point the most efficient

method is to allow competitive commercial organizations to engage in end-service provision and consumable commodities

with a high technological turnover (e.g. computers and software).

Such a proposal may be contrary to recent conventional wisdom which has operated entirely on a neoliberal market

model, whose results have been elaborated in this chapter. Organizations such as the RAND Corporation recommended

universal access to email as long ago as 1995, recognizing in the first instance that without intervention many

citizens would be without email well into the next (i.e. 21st century) and that the lack of participation of

citizens in the political process represented a grave danger to an allegedly democratic political system. Furthermore,

the report pointed out the potential of improvement for traditionally disadvantaged communities with the provision of

universal access to email and information services and the international implications for global democratization,

noting that the highest correleation co-efficient between a democratic political system was not with schooling, per

capita GDP etc but with interconnectivity (r = 0.73).

[

Robert H. Anderson, Tora K. Bikson, Sally Ann Law, Bridger M. Mitchell, Universal Access to E-Mail: Feasibility and

Societal Implications, RAND Corporation, 1995

]

The second recommendation also involves intervention by the political system into system. Whilst the first proposal was

a matter of public utility, this issue refers to the matter of establishing regulative standards for character

encoding. There is no attempt to elaborate on whether or not particular existing standards are sufficient the

ovewhelming majority of the world's population, or whether a particular language or language script will become the

default for Internet use because of economic power and technological innovation as the culture that produces the

technology names the technology. This is not the purpose of these recommendations: their objective is to suggest

possible means that a counterfactual ideal of universal access can be reached. With regards to language and character

encoding, it should be fairly clear from the data presented and that the systematic adoption of the Unicode standard is

a necessity. It is inefficient for different encodings to be used for the same character and communication is broken

when the same encodings are given to different characters. The provision of a unique character for every character

regardless of language, program or operating system is a requisite for universal access. A related recommendation is

the regulative adoption of the Internet mail consortium for email standards, the World Wide Web Consortium guidelines

for accessibility (wai-aa) and in particular, for website encoding (xhtml and css) specifications and the DAISY

consortium standards for Digital Talking Books. Again, in its in interest of universally access that such standards

should be systematically adopted and in the interests of interoperability, efficiency and communicative effectiveness.

Leaving such standards to be adopted by organizations of a social system on the basis of their own violation is assured

of failure. On an initial level, there exists competiting proprietory standards which have significant market influence

which substantially weakens the prospect of large-scale adoption of publically debated and tested standards.

Secondly, there is the cost-negating institutional imperative, where an organization will prefer not to engage in cost

activities when it is not required. This is despite the fact that not engaging in such activities means that particular

social groups (in this case the disabled, non-ASCII script users) are clearly discriminated against for their condition

or individuals for their choices (e.g., a small distribution web browser). It is clearly improbable that the

institutions will even adopt such standards of their own violition with market imperatives as the expected costs of

adopting such standards will be less than the expected returns even if the general returns will be greater with

wholesale adoption, that is, the marginal social revenue of adoption is greater than the marginal private revenue

gained by adoption.

Finally, with regards to national and international disparaties on gender and ethnic grounds no particular systematic

intervention strategies directly related to the Internet are necessary to bridge existing disparaties, as the

disparities that do exist are directly related to political inequality (particularly the imposition of religious and

other inequitable family law arrangements), structural distortions in income distribution and cultural factors (such as

the oft-commented disinterest towards technology to girls at primary and young adults at secondary school). Literacy

and expertise in computer usage (which increasingly is at least as important as literacy) however are two areas of

systematic intervention where the education subsystem can set targets to as requisite for universal access regardless

of age.

The Internet offers the potential for technologically mediated provision of information and communication beyond

anything that has been provided prior in history or by nature. It potentially includes all the features existing in

current media and further provides additoinal benefits. The prospect of universal access to such a technology provides

the possibility for the species to relate to each other on equal terms as international communication community.

However empirical evidence to date indicates that the Internet is far from this counterfactual idealized state with

particularly strong disparities on the basis of international geopolitics, language and encoding, disability and with

systematic and structural distortions on the basis of gender, ethnicity and age. Converting the actual existing

conditions to the idealized state requires systematic intervention with a democratic orientation and the adoption of

standards as a regulative regime. Commercial and de-regulated initiative important role to play, especially in the

provision of competitive cost-reduction, although this is largely peripheral to the objective of universal access.