How much money is needed to close the digital divide?
It will take billions of dollars to seed small and medium-sized programs and businesses. Rolling out infrastructure will take more billions of dollars, in part because 3 billion people in the world don’t live on the electricity grid. Then you also have to begin talking about government corruption, levels of education. Governments try to shut down Internet telephony because it threatens their cash-cow telecommunications monopolies. Governments make the mistake of thinking they can control the technology. Why should high-tech companies care about these issues when profits are crashing? This is the perfect time for them to think about this, instead of just defending their market share in the developed world, which is what firms have been doing for years. There’s a saturation of developed world markets and a real risk-averseness, with a lot of layoffs in the tech industry. But there are billions of people who have the income and want to be connected. Just look at the boom in cell phones. I
