Comment Articles

Why global Net expansion isn't charity

Douglas Batt for CNET News.com AnchorDesk

Published: 24 May 2002 10:14 BST

With each innovation, their country grows a little bit stronger, a little bit more self-sufficient, and a little bit more promising as a trading partner. The business community needs enlightened self-interest in expanding the Internet infrastructure further into the developing world.

Companies are forever trying to find new markets. Helping extend the Internet into the developing world goes one better. It creates them.

What idealists hoped for the Internet -- that it would make life better in the developing world -- was the right thing to wish for. Self-sustaining economies, with resident knowledge and classes of educated, technically savvy people, are better for their own citizens. They are better for the rest of the world too.

Among the many lessons from September 11 is that what happens in one nation affects many -- sometimes tragically. Extending the Internet further into the developing world nurtures -- not creates, but nurtures -- economic prosperity, which is the most important ingredient of worldwide stability. UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) is dedicated to closing the "digital divide" between wired and unwired countries.

Some carefully directed support of its efforts -- equipment donations, price breaks -- will pay economic dividends down the line even as it offers immediate, if modest, social and political benefits in the developing world today.

Douglas Batt is vice president of Concord Communications, a Marlboro, Massachusetts-based developer of fault- and performance-management software solutions. He spoke on closing the digital divide at the Global E-Commerce Conference at the United Nations in February.

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