A great deal of attention is being paid today to the so-called digital divide—the division of the world into the info(information) rich and the info poor. And that divide does exist today. My wife and I lectured about this looming danger twenty years ago. What was less visible then, however, were the new, positive forces that work against the digital divide. There are reasons to be optimistic.

There are technological reasons to hope the digital divide will narrow. As the Internet becomes more and more commercialized, it is in the interest of business to universalize access—after all, the more people online, the more potential customers there are. More and more governments, afraid their countries will be left behind, want to spread Internet access. Within the next decade or two, one to two billion people on the planet will be netted together. As a result, I now believe the digital divide will narrow rather than widen in the years ahead. And that is very good news because the Internet may well be the most powerful tool for combating world poverty that we’ve ever had.

Of course, the use of the Internet isn’t the only way to defeat poverty. And the Internet is not the only tool we have. But it has enormous potential.

To take advantage of this tool, some impoverished countries will have to get over their outdated anti-colonial prejudices with respect to foreign investment. Countries that still think foreign investment is an invasion of their sovereignty might well study the history of infrastructure (the basic structural foundations of a society) in the United States. When the United States built its industrials infrastructure, it didn’t have the capital to do so. And that is why America’s Second Wave infrastructure—including roads, barbors, highways, ports and so on—were built with foreign investment. The English, the Germans, the Dutch and the French were investing in Britain’s former colony. They financed them. Immigrant Americans built them. Guess who owns them now? The Americans. I believe the same thing would be true in places like Brazil or anywhere else for that matter. The more foreign capital you have helping you build your Third Wave infrastructure, which today is an electronic infrastructure, the better off you’re going to be. That doesn’t mean lying down and becoming fooled, or letting foreign corporations run uncontrolled. But it does mean recognizing how important they can be in building the energy and telecom infrastructures needed to take full advantage of the Internet.

全文翻译

今天，人们十分关注所谓的数字鸿沟问题，即世界被分为信息资源丰富区和信息资源贫乏区两类。这个鸿沟今天确实存在，我和我妻子20年前谈过这个隐伏的危险。然而，那时一些抵制数字鸿沟的、新的积极因素还不如今天明显。我们是有理由感到乐观的。

一些技术上的因素使我们有理由希望鸿沟会缩小。随着互联网变得越来越商业化，普及上网对商家是有利的——毕竟，上网人数越多，潜在的客户就越多。越来越多的政府，由于担心自己的国家会落后，都想推广互联网。一二十年之内，全球将有一二十亿人被网在一起。因此，我现在相信，在将来，数字鸿沟将会缩小而不是扩大。这是非常好的消息，因为互联网非常可能成为我们消除所面临的贫困的最强有效的工具。

当然，使用互联网不是唯一战胜贫困的方法。互联网也不是我们所拥有的唯一工具，但它却有巨大的潜力。

要想利用互联网这个工具，某些贫困国家必须克服在外国投资方面的过时的反殖民偏见。那些认为外国投资是对本国主权的侵犯的国家最好还是研究一下美国基础设施(社会的基本结构基础)的历史。当初美国建设自己的工业基础设施时，缺乏资金，这就是为什么美国的第二波基础设施建设——包括公路、港口，高速公路、港口城市等等——都是利用的国外资金。英国人、德国人、荷兰人和法国人都在这片前英国殖民地投资。他们提供资金，美国移民建造。想想看，现在谁拥有这一切？美国人。我想，同样的事情也可以发生在巴西或其他任何地方。你拥有的去建造第三次浪潮基础设施(今天主要指电子基础设施)的外国资金越多，那么你就越富裕。这并不是说卑躬屈膝，任人愚弄，也不是让外国公司为所欲为。但这的确意味着你已认识到外国公司对本国能源及通信基础设施建设的重要性，这些基础设施是充分利用互联网所必要的。