What is it that makes

What is it that makes the Digital Divide such a compelling challenge?
Apart from the fact that it nicely mixes my interest in global economics, international development and human rights, with my geeky tendencies towards internet related things?
I guess it's the search for that revolutionary, ground-breaking quality of the Internet.
I remember my days at University. Coinciding with the emergence of the WWW, those were the days when I first considered the potential of a free, open non-centralized network. The educational possibilites, the political changes and the general liberalisation of information. I seem to remember a time when I believed the Internet would really make a difference. Profoundly.

Then came the great commercialization. The realization that most of what the Internet was used for, were simple, if elegant extensions of the market-place. Advertising, E-commerce, increased efficiencies of global corporations etc.
Admittedly, with personal publishing, peer2peer networking and the potential for someone small to create something big, there were more profound changes. Just not the ones I was looking for.

But I still have my faith in the technology. And I've projected that faith onto an area where I still feel I can make a difference without having to do ground-breaking research into some new optical fiber or quantum switch technology.
And I've slowly come to realize that every time we educate another computer science major, develop a more efficient B2B marketplace, or decide to feed more funds into research, we are increasing the gap between us and them. I'm not sure that that really matters by itself. I mean, the developing world should hardly be measuring it's progress by that of the developed world. It should be measuring it in terms of quality of life, infant mortality, life expectancy, political stability, human rights violations, and the satisfaction of the local population etc. Real world facts that say something about real world circumstances. Not compared to the US or Denmark, but compared to that same country 10 years earlier. "re we improving?" is probably a better question than "Are we as good as the US?".

Many of those quality of life issues are a question of starvation caused by freaks of nature, climactic changes, pollution, or bad infrastructure. As long as there are no roads leading to large parts of Africa, there is no way to distribute food efficiently, making anything but subsistence farming an unviable proposition. Fly in food, build roads, build water and electrical utilities, aid the immediate concerns, don't worry about access to the internet. Bill Gates reminds us that the poor can't eat computers, and while they are starving, they probably don't need to be able to download the latest Lord of the Rings Trailer. He is right.

But that's only part of the picture. In the layer between the rich, developed, growth-focused western countries, and the poverty-stricken, war-ridden, draught-struck lottery losers, there are many countries with the politial stability, the popular will, and the potential to improve. Burdenned by huge debt, unfriendly climates, or merely by generations of colonial exploitation and under-developed education systems and infrastructure, they have the will, but not really the tools to succeed.

In that part of the world, one of the main problems is the lack of proper, widely-used education systems. The same education that paved the way for the incredible improvements in western living conditions over the past 2-300 years. The same education that is the main reason for the extreme overweight in research and patents developed and used in the western world, and the same education that secures our democracy.

Can the Internet helpthe developing world reach that level of education?