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as the EFI noted, are higher than the United Kingdom's; however, the report fails to consider that local calling is billed differently (more cheaply) in Ireland, even though long distance calling is as much as 50 percent more expensive. For city residents with local dial-up to an ISP node, therefore, Irish users may be better off than their British counterparts.

EFI is, however, correct when it says that "those living in rural areas, who have most to gain from telecommunications, are penalized for taking advantage of it." This is just as true in the United States, where rural areas often are not served by local dial-up Internet access. Add the fact that rural libraries usually have less funding and are therefore less able to supply Internet connections, and the fact that salaries are often lower, it's obvious why those who already have the most real-world services--urban residents--also have the best Internet access. Ithaca, New York, the home of Cornell University, didn't get a CompuServe node until about 1992; the town where some friends of mine live in southeastern Ohio will probably never have one. Both those communities now have dial-up Internet access from their local colleges, however.

At least one survey has shown that these costs matter. An Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) study released in June 1996 showed that although Scandinavia has just 5 percent of Europe's population, it has 25 percent of Europe's Internet hosts. It also showed a strong correlation between competitive telecommunications markets and lower prices, and between Internet penetration and competitive telecommunications markets. In addition, the report found that "a major reason that a sufficient amount of local content is not available in some countries is because domestic producers and users do not have efficient access to networks."[10] In other words, better access means better opportunities not only for getting information but for publishing it. This issue of local content is an important one in most countries outside the United States, who fear that the predominantly American character of the Internet may overpower local languages and cultures the way it already dominates the entertainment industry. However, it's equally possible that the Internet will continue to do the job it's already doing of uniting dispersed subcultures and making them stronger, whether it's by allowing a tiny Scottish radio station to broadcast popular Scottish performers to the rest of the world or by helping scholars to preserve obscure languages.

The European Parliament is already aware of this problem: "If the development of information highways is not sufficiently well structured, it could lead to all types of abuse and undermining of democracy by creating a gulf between those who are able to master this technological instrument and those who are not," runs the resolution it drafted in 1995,[11] stressing the importance of protecting European cultural values, ensuring easy access, low costs, and the provision of some basic services free of charge (while simultaneously proposing to tighten up copyright law and crack down on piracy). However, the European Parliament's criteria for success are economic rather than idealistic: "In conditions of unemployment such as those prevailing in the Union at the moment, the information revolution will prove its worth to society and ultimately consolidate itself only to the extent that its impact on the employment situation turns out to be on balance, positive." In other words, people can't live by electrons alone, something that will only be surprising to people who have been on the Net so long at a stretch that when they get hungry they type "pizza" at the nearest system prompt and expect food.[12]

But granted that public Internet access can be provided via public terminals situated in libraries, schools, or even corner kiosks coupled with local Free-Nets to provide email and a basic set of functions, raw access isn't much good if everything online has a price tag.

The problem is that these concerns about equal access come at a time when intellectual property laws are being reexamined and tightened.[13] Copyright protection has been extended, and the Software Publishers' Association is pressuring ISPs to police their systems for potential infringements. At the same time, the culture that surrounded the UNIX operating system and the Internet generally, in which researchers created tools because they needed them personally