A Global Gap.(digital divide)

For all his adult life, Van Thavi, 33, and his neighbors in the remote Cambodian village of Robib had been cut off from civilization, courtesy of Pol Pot's ruthless army. Soldiers would hide in long-abandoned rubber plantations along the only route to town and ambush passersby, or lay mines on the deeply potholed road and its rickety bridges. By the time the Khmer Rouge was driven from the area in the spring of 1998, the villagers had become habituated to their isolation.

So it was all the more shocking when, one sunny day last year, a military helicopter descended from the sky and disgorged Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor and technology guru Nicholas Negroponte and American philanthropist Bernard Krisher. They had come to announce that something called the Internet had arrived at last in the village. "You probably will not understand what I am telling you today," said Krisher over a squeaking public-address system, "but in six months you will." The assembled crowd of sinewy, bare-chested farmers, who had no electricity or telephones, listened in fascination, and also befuddlement, as Krisher elaborated on the benefits of telemedicine and e-commerce.

Robib had just become the latest battleground in the war against the so-called digital divide. This is the discrepancy between rich countries, in which a third to half of the citizens have Internet access, and poor ones, in which one in a hundred do. By the United Nations' tally, half the world's population is shut out of cyberspace. For residents of most rural Third World villages, the chance of stumbling upon the Internet is zero.

In the past few years, scores of scientists and policymakers have begun trying to change this equation by linking up isolated villages in the developing world. They are motivated in part by the ready availability of grant money for the purpose. The United Nations is backing several Third World Internet projects. Hewlett-Packard recently announced an initiative to donate computers to such projects. The Soros Foundation is setting up Internet centers in Eastern Europe.

Cheap technology is another driver. It is now possible to package the computers, modems, solar panels and satellite-dish antennas cheaply enough to hand them out to remote villages. Researchers at MIT, for instance, have developed a high-tech remote Internet community center called LINCOS (Little Intelligent Communities). It is a discarded steel-shipping container stocked with computer equipment and dressed up with a nice white awning. In January 2000 MIT sprang the first unit on the Costa Rican village of San Marcos, and since then it has installed seven more in Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic.

These programs have plenty of critics, who ask, "What is the point of giving computers to people who lack adequate food, and whose countries are being ravaged by AIDS and wars?" This argument, promoters counter, could also be used against literacy programs. And if developing nations don't connect, they risk missing out on their share of the $7 trillion it's estimated will be circulating in cyberspace by 2004. "We're notsaying everybody should have a computer," says Sarabuland Khan, director of the U.N. Economic and Social Council, which plans to raise $1 billion to deploy Internet hookups. "We're talking about community access--a computer every three or four miles. A poor woman who is trying to get food might not need to use it. But the man who is taking care of that woman might need to use the computer for crop information, weather information or access to doctors."

Internet access may allow some disenfranchised Third Worlders to bypass political turmoil and spotty infrastructure and join the global cybercommunity. The experiments are providing glimpses of what's possible: medical consultations with big-city doctors, digital marketplaces where natives peddle their wares to wealthy suburbanites thousands of miles away and educational opportunities that help overcome ignorance and isolation. Since most programs are only now getting started, it's too early to tell whether they'll work. But it's worth taking a look at how the first ones are faring.