b) The Internet is revolutionary, but not Utopian.
The Net is an extraordinary communications tool that provides a range of new opportunities for people, communities, businesses, and government. Yet as cyberspace becomes more populated, it increasingly resembles society at large, in all its complexity. For every empowering or enlightening aspect of the wired life, there will also be dimensions that are malicious, perverse, or rather ordinary.
c) Government has an important role to play on the electronic frontier.
Contrary to some claims, cyberspace is not formally a place or jurisdiction separate from Earth. While governments should respect the rules and customs that have arisen in cyberspace, and should not stifle this new world with inefficient regulation or censorship, it is foolish to say that the public has no sovereignty over what an errant citizen or fraudulent corporation does on-line. As the representative of the people and the guardian of democratic values, the state has the right and responsibility to help integrate cyberspace and conventional society.
Technology standards and privacy issues, for example, are too important to be entrusted to the marketplace alone. Competing software firms have little interest in preserving the open standards that are essential to a fully functioning interactive network. Markets encourage innovation, but they do not necessarily insure the public interest."
2.2. The "Info-Rich" and the "Info-Poor"
There is a close correlation between economic and social development and access to telecommunications. Access to new communication technologies expands much more rapidly in the North than in the South, and there are many more web servers in North America and in Europe than on the other continents. Two-thirds of the Internet users live in the United States, where 40% of households are equipped with a computer, a percentage that we also find in Denmark, Switzerland and Netherlands. The percentage is 30% in Germany, 25% in United Kingdom, and 20% for most industrialized countries.
The statistics of March 1998 on the percentage of connections per number of inhabitants, available in the Computer Industry Almanach (CIA), a reference document on the evolution of cyberspace, show that Finland is the most connected country in the world with 25% of its population connected, followed by Norway (23%) and Iceland (22.7%). The United States is in fourth place with 20%. Eleven countries in the world have a proportion of Internet users above 10%, and Switzerland is eleventh, with 10.7%.
Regarding the global percentage, the statistics of end 1997 of the Computer Industry Almanach - which take into consideration the connections at home, at work and in academic institutions - show that the United States is still considerably ahead with 54.68% of the global percentage, followed by Japan (7.97%), the United Kingdom (5.83%) and Canada (4.33%). The survey also shows that the US lead is constantly decreasing - it went from 80% in 1991 to less than 65% in 1994, with prospects of 50% in 1998 and less than 40% in 2000.
Nevertheless, if we consider the whole planet, universal access to information highways is far from the reality. Regarding basic telephony, teledensity varies from more than 60 phone lines per 100 inhabitants in the richest countries to less than one in the poorest countries. Fifty per cent of phone lines in the world are in northern America and western Europe. Half of the world's population has never used a phone.