* The divide is closing—if we take a let-them-eat-cake attitude, that is.

There are many signs that the divide is closing fast. According to Compaine's "Declare the War Won," cost is no longer prohibitive. Equipment costs have dropped dramatically to under $1000; newly developed net appliances for accessing the Web can be had for under $500; and free Web-based email is available. Plus, the value of the Internet has appreciated, as more people get online. For example, as more people use email, that capability becomes more used and more useful. To be sure, Internet service providers start their buildouts with groups most likely to buy; by the same token, they expand into other markets as other groups become interested in buying, too. And "current rates of adoption for those groups variously included on the unwired side of the early divide are greater than for the population as a whole" (p. 326). The latest studies have shown that PC ownership among Hispanics has grown 55% faster than the population at large; and the highest rate of growth, according to Forrester's study of 80,000 households, the largest sample to date, is among African American households.

          Compaine also stresses, as does Adam Clayton Powell III in "Falling for the Gap: Whatever Happened to the Digital Divide?," that gaps will always be with us, not because the poor will always be with us but because some will always be "voluntary non-users." Just as some choose to not have television, as acts of resistance to mass culture, so there will be many who will choose to pay $20 for cable but not $10 for a dial-tone. After all, not everyone has an automobile, Compaine argues, but we don't talk about auto haves and auto have-nots; nor does anyone advocate giving away free automobiles to equalize that divide. Nor has anyone ever advocated giving away television sets to the poor. John Simons in "Cheap Computers Bridge Digital Divide" suggests—apparently, with a straight-face—that for the poorest of the poor, perhaps municipalities could put in public Internet kiosks on street corners, like public telephones. "Today's digital divide was yesterday's computers-in-the-schools divide [...], the television divide of 1955, the radio divide of 1930, or the book divide of the previous half-millennium. The difference between then and now is that both the technologies and the business models seem to eliminate most of these gaps at much faster rates." (Compaine, p. 102).

          What Compaine, Powell, and Simons fail to acknowledge, however, is the role of public policy in shaping
Overview
Pro-Public Policy Position
Insights from Free Market Position
   * The definition is a moving target
   * Haves/have-nots is a false binary
   * Utopian claims need to be tempered
   * Emergent technologies diffuse unevenly
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these outcomes, for without the infrastructure, these groups would not have emerged as "markets" in the first place. That is exactly what the Clinton-Gore administration hoped to achieve: to grow the economy by continued government sponsorship of the Internet. In the past, public funding supported other infrastructures, including transcontinental railroads and interstate highways. And public funding continues to shore up mass transit even today.