To understand the new opportunities to close the digital divide, let’s consider how strategies for closing the Divide have evolved. The movement passed through four phases before stakeholders from all sectors arrived at fifth phase when they came to the same conclusion: the only way to close the Digital Divide is to meaningfully deploy broadband. Broadband is the end-game of the digital revolution because it creates a platform for convergence that can accommodate all interactive media by which digital “machines” get linked to people, places and things. Closing the digital divide now means closing the “broadband gap within and between nations” while making sure that broadband is put to meaningful use. DDI’s model, called Meaningful Broadband, emerged to address this current phase of the effort to close digital divide.

 

First Phase (1994-1998) An Ideological Schism

 

The Digital Divide first loomed as a public-policy issue in 1994 in the debates surrounding the passage of the US Telecommunications Act. Back then, the Digital Divide issue was caught in an ideological friction between public and private sectors. Politicians bolstered by lobbyists for consumer interests argued the private sector should pay costs of bringing the poor into the “information society” as the digital economy was then known. The private sector disagreed. Its leaders insisted that governments should subsidize technological internet infrastructures and deregulate the telecom sector so that prices could drop. Both sides were right, in a way. Corporate lobbyists and regulators saw the Digital Divide issue as an extension of the 50-year old debate over “universal services obligation,” (USO) in which governments and telephone companies postured over who should pay the high costs of hooking up rural citizens.

 

Second Phase (1998-2001): ICT companies in the West relegated “digital divide” to their philanthropy (CSR) divisions – while keeping their core business strategies unchanged.

 

At first digital moguls were defensive about the topic. (At the height of the dot-com boom, Bill Gates pooh-poohed the Digital Divide, claiming that the digital divide will close by itself without any special effort by government or business.) But, as the dot-com boom occurred, the big ICT multinationals overcame their reactive stance and decided to “own” the Digital Divide topic – by turning the matter over to their philanthropic (CSR) divisions. According to my own published book (Digital Corporate Citizenship, University of Indiana Press, 2004), 74 big multinational IT companies in Silicon Valley poured $2 billion a year into such philanthropic efforts through 2001. Their motive was clear: they pointed to one-off examples of what digital technology could do to help society in hopes of allaying the public’s concerns about the digital divide. The crash in tech stocks in the year eased pressure on the companies enormously. CEOs stopped making speeches expressing their concern on digital divide and philanthropic budgets plummeted. The reality is that, during this period, none of the major ICT multinational corporations in the West or Japan altered their core business practices to close the Digital Divide.

 

Third Phase (2001-2004) The Digital Divide movement shifts to emerging markets where it became a driver of telecommunications reforms.

 

During this period, more than 100 nations established “ICT ministries,” whose primary goal was to help their nations close digital divide. At least a dozen global indexes offering “ICT indicators” emerged in order to rank each nation’s readiness to absorb “next generation technologies.” Many of their ministers saw Digital Divide as a way of enhancing their ranking on these indexes even if it meant challenging the power of entrenched elites both in business and government which were protecting the status quo in telecommunications. The debate over whether government policies should encourage tech-friendly market forces — or contain them — had only just begun. In China, Brazil, India and a dozen other large emerging markets new ties emerged between reformist government officials and local IT executives who had attained rock star status with the public. Their common cause was the promotion of “disruptive technologies.” 

 

Fourth Phase (2004-2009): Web 2.0: The “User Revolution” Meets the Digital Divide

 

The User Revolution (Web 2.0) emerged as the driving new factor in technology design since 2004, Silicon Valley shifted its focus away from serving the enterprise markets to appealing to “user experience” of consumers – even in circumstances when no business model was in sight. The new topic in conferences devoted to closing the Digital Divide regarded how to bring the user revolution to the masses in emerging markets, particularly in Asia. Companies such as Intel, Microsoft and Nokia hired ethnographers  (anthropologists) to determine what users want in remote locations. The focus was on building “digital ecosystems” that were “context-relevant” – not imposed from the West. But the deeper matter became the redesign of learning processes that are traditional to the rural sectors of emerging markets. The new rallying cry of the digital divide movement became to “unlock human development” through bringing interactive learning to those whose had little formal education. Thus, Web 2.0 seemed to coincide with the long-standing agenda of the “community networking” and “direct democracy” movements in which citizens were encouraged to self-create their own systems of governance.

 

Fifth Phase (2006-Present): Most ICT stakeholders now agree that broadband (meaningfully deployed) is the key to closing Digital Divide.

 

Noting the speed by which the world’s citizens embraced cell phones, all ICT stakeholders now envision a second mobile revolution in which wireless infrastructures, cheap devices, etc. become leveraged and upgraded to produce “broadband ecosystems” which serve entire nations. Causes which were once separate from the digital divide movement – like containing climate change – were now front and center in the effort to create broadband ecosystems. Why? Because closing the digital divide also meant bringing “smart electrification” to each nation so that broadband-development and alternative-energy development can co-emerge in each ecosystem. This phase of the movement to close the digital divide coincides with a change in the world’s major IT laboratories which promoted innovations that would adapt new technologies to the needs of the “next five billion” which were still unconnected. The corporate, governmental and academic leaders who were once at odds about closing the digital divide now agree that there is only one way to close the Digital Divide: by bringing broadband to everyone and do so in a way that is aligned with qualitative reforms to macroeconomies that are sought by governments. This broad consensus explains the current feasibility of the deployment of the Meaningful Broadband model in emerging markets. Now that everyone agrees on the goal, the path to achieving it is emerging.