Now THIS could be TEOTWAWKI:
And let's all pay Internet taxes to the UN - NOT!:
Monday July 12, 3:05 pm Eastern Time
UN: Internet helps create parallel societies
(adds details on Internet, paras 3,9-11)
By Evelyn Leopold
UNITED NATIONS, July 12 (Reuters) - When leaders of an attempted coup against Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev seized radio and television stations in 1991, Russians used a fledgling computer and facsimile network to disseminate calls for resistance to defeat the revolt.
Within a few years, use of the Internet exploded, opening a fast track to knowledge and communications. But fewer than 3 percent of Russians today have access to it, says the 1999 Human Development report, released by the U.N. Development Program (UNDP) on Monday.
And in Bangladesh, buying a computer would cost the average person more than eight years' income compared with just one month's wage for the average American.
Some 88 percent of the world's Internet users -- 143 million in 1998 and a predicted 700 million in 2001 -- are in wealthy industrial nations with the United States having more computers than the rest of the world combined
The current Internet user, for example, is male, 35 years old or younger, college-educated, English-speaking and more often than not a resident of the United States, where 26 percent of the population use the World Wide Web.
The Internet, an example of the shrinking global village, at the same time shows up glaring inequalities in the world economy, with rich countries getting richer and new developments outpacing the ability of the poor nations to deal with them, the report said.
''Even as communications, transportation and technology are driving global economic expansion, headway on poverty is not keeping pace,'' said CNN founder Ted Turner in a contribution to the report.
''It is as if globalization is in fast-forward and the world's ability to understand and react to it is in slow motion,'' he said.
Yet many use the Internet in developing nations, especially scientists, academics and governments, such as in India and Malaysia. India has also produces software for export.
Telephones, a necessity, for connecting to the web, are uneven. Thailand has more cellular phones than the whole of Africa and Bulgaria has more Internet hosts than sub-Sahara Africa except for South Africa. In several African countries average monthly Internet connection and use costs run as high as $100 compared with $20 in the United States.
And even in South Africa, the best-connected African country, about 75 percent of the schools have no telephone.
The Human Development Report for 10 years has searched for new ways to measure the lives of people, using a yardstick that goes beyond economic statistics -- such as who goes to school, who has clean water and who shares in economic benefits.
This year's 260-page survey focuses on trends in "globalization -- the growing integration of economies, culture and science around the world which has been spurred by an explosion in information and communications technology.
It concludes that the rules of globalization need to be rewritten to make them work for people rather than profits, arguing against an unfettered market economy.
''The challenge is not to stop the expansion of global markets,'' the report said. ''The challenge ... is to preserve the advantage of global markets and competition but also to provide enough space for human, community and environmental resources to ensure that globalization works for people.''
Since the 1980s many countries have benefited from globalization, among them Thailand, Malaysia, South Korea, Chile, the Dominican Republic, Mauritius and Poland, which have taken advantage of economic and technological opportunities.
At the other end many countries reap few benefits, with Madagascar, Niger, Russia, Tajikistan and Venezuela among them.
A fifth of the world's people living in high income countries control 86 percent of the world export markets, 68 percent of foreign investment and 74 percent of the telephone lines. Rich countries or corporations have directed 80 percent of their foreign investments to only 20 nations in Eastern Europe and the developing world, mainly to China.
The result is a ''grotesque and dangerous polarization'' between those benefiting from the system and those who are ''merely passive recipients of its effects,'' the report said.
But the authors of the report argue that pernicious trends of market expansion are not inevitable.
Among their suggestions are creating regional labor, environmental and social standards for multinational corporations rather than relying only on voluntary codes.
Others include new sources of finance for technology, such as a ''bit tax'' on Internet messages and independent legal aid to support weaker countries in the World Trade Organization as well as debt relief for the poorest countries.
biz.yahoo.com
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