ach of us to
consider the biases of various technologies and to seek out those that reflect
our values and aspirations.

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 popul