单选题
A great deal of attention is being paid today to the
so-called digital divide--the division of the world into the
info(information)rich and the info poor. And that divide does exist today. My
wife and I lectured about this looming danger twenty years ago. What was less
visible then, however, were the new, positive forces that work against the
digital divide. There are reasons to be optimistic. There are
technological reasons to hope the digital divide will narrow. As the Internet
becomes more and more commercialized, it is in the interest of business to
universalize access-after all, the more people online, the more potential
customers there are. More and more governments, afraid their countries will be
left behind, want to spread Internet access. Within the next decade or two, one
to two billion people on the planet will be netted together. As a result, I now
believe the digital divide will narrow rather than widen in the years ahead. And
that is very good news because the Internet may well be the most powerful tool
for combating world poverty that we've ever had. Of course, the
use of the Internet isn't the only way to defeat poverty. And the Internet is
not the only tool we have. But it has enormous potential. To
take advantage of this tool, some impoverished countries will have to get over
their outdated anti-colonial prejudices with respect to foreign investment.
Countries that still think foreign investment is an invasion of their
sovereignty might well study the history of infrastructure (the basic structural
foundations of a society) in the United States. When the United States
built its industrial infrastructure, it didn't have the capital to do so. And
that is why America's Second Wave infrastructure--including roads, harbors,
highways, ports and so on--were built with foreign investment. The English, the
Germans, the Dutch and the French were investing in Britain's former colony.
They financed them. Immigrant Americans built them. Guess who owns them
now? The Americans. I believe the same thing would be true in places Like
Brazil or anywhere else for that matter. The more foreign capital you have
helping you build your Third Wave infrastructure, which today is an electronic
infrastructure, the better off you're going to be. That doesn't mean lying down
and becoming fooled, or letting foreign corporations run uncontrolled. But it
does mean recognizing how important they can be in building the energy and
telecom infrastructures needed to take full advantage of the Internet.