As you'll see in what follows, sparks fly between the two. But, in a way that seldom happens in forceful debate, the two manage to shed more light than heat.

John Perry Barlow: A widespread view holds that technology is enlarging the gap between the advantaged and the disadvantaged. As with most things regarding the Internet, this is both right and wrong. It is right insofar as cyberspace is a genuine meritocracy—the less intelligent will do less well than the smart. It is wrong in that many of the advantaged—those with their minds stuck in the industrial period, its society, and its economics—won't do so well, either. I worry most about 50-year-old guys in positions of power who can't type. Those are the truly marginalized.

Timothy Jenkins: Well, that picture would be fine if the variables really were intelligence and initiative. But I think the evidence shows the contrary. Access to these new digital tools is primarily determined by income, educational attainment, geographical location, perhaps age as well, and those factors generally work against people who are currently disadvantaged. A study by the Commerce Department called "Falling Through the Net" corroborates that.

While the general population has been increasing its access to the Internet, inner-city populations have been reducing their connection even to telephone service because it's too expensive. With the Internet, the costs of connection, equipment, education, and training may very well keep the disadvantaged disadvantaged. Correcting this inertia seems to me worthy of major intervention. Such a force should not be governmental. The effort should come from those, such as computer and software companies, that are making the most in the way of returns. But I have yet to see them make any effort.

Barlow: I'm not sure I agree that the economic entry barrier is high. You can get an Internet connection in any American city for a lot less than you can get cable television. And many people in the inner city have cable TV. Furthermore, digital hardware is so plentiful that we're plowing it into landfills. The hardware cost for rudimentary Internet connection is practically nonexistent. The real issue is making people who have not been advantaged aware of what's there for them.

Jenkins: That would be my hope, too, but it isn't my experience. The U.S. has the highest technology, but there's still a huge problem concerning access. Upper-income people have an advantage of three-to-one or five-to-one when it comes to access to computers and computer literacy or connection to the Internet. Information-technology manufacturers ought to be intelligent enough to see that it's in their interest to multiply their customer base.

Barlow: Our filters give us different points of view here. It looks to me as though the Internet did grow from the edges rather than the center. People out at the ends wanted higher rates of connection and were willing to pay for it. The Internet has been a mass phenomenon, not an elitist one.

Jenkins: Yes, access has grown and, yes, we have had a tremendous explosion. But it's been skewed. When you look at central cities, at rural enclaves, at low-income groups, at wherever the poor are congregated and education is scarce, you see a tremendous lack of access.

Barlow: I don't know how we can prevent a certain lag here. It's unreasonable under any circumstances to expect rural or poor areas to come on-line as fast as wealthy and urban areas. The question is, are we talking about "haves and have-nots" or "haves and don't-have-yets?"

I live in a rural place. It's about as far away from any kind of telecommunications center as you can get. For a long time, to be on-line I had to foot the bill of a long-distance telephone call. Suddenly in the last year, though, it has become possible for me to have a [high-speed] ISDN connection for $20 a month. And that drop in price holds true in most parts of the rural West, as far as I can tell. Sure, somebody in San Francisco gets improvements earlier, but the fact is that gains get distributed everywhere fairly rapidly.

Jenkins: But the rural West would not have been connected at all except for regulation through the FCC that obliged common carriers to do certain things that market forces would not support. This was true of rural electrification as well as telephone service.

Barlow: That is completely untrue. As a matter of fact, the problem that we have in rural America is that many small telephone companies that provided communication services have been bought up by large companies. The large companies simply rake off the universal-service set-asides required by the FCC and don't provide any service. I have high-speed service because of completely private ventures in the state of Wyoming.

Jenkins: I'm not suggesting the subsidy system has no opportunities for abuse. But to say that rural service was provided simply through market forces without regulatory incentives is an absolute distortion of reality.

Barlow: But you're assuming that policy intervention is still the way to go. I would strongly disagree. It may have been necessary for rural electrification and telephone communication, but it is certainly not the model to follow at this point.

Jenkins: This new Internet-based technology is going to be more costly to the consumer than the old technology.

Barlow: What makes you say that? The cost of deploying a packet-switch network like the Internet is a tiny fraction of the cost of deploying a traditional switch telephone.

Jenkins: I'm talking about the monthly carrying charges, as well as equipment and software.

Barlow: Internet connection costs have been plummeting over the past five years.

Jenkins: I agree. But you're not responding to my issue. What's the probability that people in the inner cities or poor communities can afford the expense to have Internet access?

Barlow: You're assuming the only way to be on-line is to have access from home.

Jenkins: Not at all. It is not uncommon for community centers and libraries to endure the same deprivations that private homes do. Public schools in low-income areas don't have the same quality of computers, the same number of computers, the same ratio of computers to students, the same speed of access to the Internet that schools in high-income areas have. That creates a second-class electronic citizenship. It leaves in place for the 21st century the same kind of educational barriers that we had in the 20th.

Barlow: Well, I can't disagree with that. But major hardware manufacturers and many of the major software manufacturers all have programs to see that information technology is being distributed, at least in the U.S.

Jenkins: It's really token at best. I have yet to see a single company that, despite all of its pretensions of philanthropy, has made a donation that equaled the aggregate salaries of its top five executives. I've talked with major chief executives. Invariably, they want to rely on market forces to cure this problem. That cannot be sufficient. If high-tech companies—which operate in the wealthiest sector of the economy—can't afford some social tax, then nobody can.

Barlow: You're certainly someone who believes in centralized, planned solutions.

Jenkins: Not at all. I'm a practicing Republican. My view is that enlightened and imaginative self-interest seems to be missing in the very sophisticated computer industry. That deficiency is going to lead us to a social confrontation that is completely avoidable. The same creativity that gave us these technologies ought to be able to solve these problems before they become insurmountable.

Barlow: Are you suggesting that corporate outreach is simply not happening or that it's not happening enough?

Jenkins: In some cases, it's not happening at all. Yes, there have been high-profile token activities, like wiring a few schools. But the private sector hasn't given training to the incarcerated. There's no serious push to make faith-based institutions into alternative sources of after-school and vocational education. There is no serious private-sector help to public programs aimed at retraining the core unemployed.

This is a reversible emergency. What is now a wedge issue could be turned into a bridge issue.

Barlow: The interesting thing is that almost everyone who has figured out how to use a computer, how to go on-line, has done it on his own by playing around.

Jenkins: Like you, I think informal learning is more successful. But I want it to happen on a grand scale. I want to see a revolutionary outreach that involves volunteer organizations, nonprofit organizations, and faith-based institutions. I've tried to make introductions with industry for after-school programs and weekend programs in 10 major metropolitan markets through black and Hispanic churches. Invariably, I've met with very little industry response. That's sad.

Barlow: You're looking at the problem from the standpoint of "push," providing technology to people. I approach it from the standpoint of "pull"—people seeing value, then trying something. The market has to be interested. It has to be ready.

Jenkins: It is not lack of interest or readiness. It's lack of affordable access. You can't deal with demand strictly in market terms. When the equipment is provided, low-income or minority kids spend more time at the keyboard than their more affluent counterparts. "Pull" takes purchasing power. Desire without ability to buy is not sufficient.

Barlow: Desire has to precede deployment.

Jenkins: Desire goes with deployment. How can you desire something you've never seen and don't understand?

Barlow: Actually, we're in agreement. It's just a matter of where those interventions arise. You're asking industry to do these things when I think that it's something for individuals themselves. People savvy about technology do have a responsibility to go into communities where they wouldn't ordinarily find themselves and make their knowledge available. That's what I'm doing.

Jenkins: My deeper point of departure is not just the U.S. It's global access. Most of mankind has yet to make its first telephone call, let alone its first Internet connection. The financial barrier in poor countries is very different.

Barlow: You're again assuming that the only way to participate on the Internet is to have your own machine in your own home with your own connection. That's not the model I see developing in most of the poor world. There's no reason television has to be the metaphor for Internet access. We need to think about all the on-line connections that are becoming available, especially in public places. In Africa, village information centers are cropping up all over the place. Maybe not phones in their own homes, but the informational equivalent of the village well.

Jenkins: The village well is a cheerful but misleading image. How will you ever reach anything approaching parity in using these new technologies when a telephone line serves 100 to 200 people? In every respect with communications, the Third World, Africa in particular, is the last in line. I certainly support new methods for providing access to groups, but that does not preclude championing ownership. It is doubtful there will be neighborhood vehicles comparable even to a pay phone.

Barlow: The real problem in less-advantaged countries is regulation. The colonial telephone system still operates there and has been even more effective than the Baby Bells in stopping the Internet's spread. With telephone service being deregulated, you're going to see an explosion of new communication systems based on much cheaper Internet and packet-switch networking. It's already starting. Most of the continent will likely have Internet access within five years.

Jenkins: A year ago, on invitation, I delivered a paper to the United Nations on "Erasing E-Racism and Digitizing Democracy." The statistics clearly showed lack of access to technologies to be worldwide.

Barlow: Linear projections from current statistics don't tell you enough. Three or four years ago, the on-line population was only 8% female. Now, it's at parity with males in the U.S. By next year, there will be more females on-line. These things change quickly. Furthermore, the Internet has doubled in size predictably every year. In a short time, it can be everywhere.

By the way, many cultures that have been marginalized have a great advantage in an information economy. Often, their notion of value is based on relationship rather than property, and relationships explain how information moves and reshapes itself. I would say also many of these cultures have a higher capacity to learn. On trips to Africa, I gave a little test to everybody from Masai tribesmen to street people. I never found an African, literate or illiterate, whom I couldn't teach how to use my laptop in a rudimentary fashion inside a half-hour. I've never found a member of Congress I could do this with.

Jenkins: That may be, but there are problems with your scenario for ubiquitous access. Low-orbit satellite technology for continental communications is a multibillion-dollar investment. African nations do not have sufficient investment capital to introduce these advanced technologies. And they can't seem to attract it, either. The Regional African Satellite Communications Agency has sought bidders to build a low-orbit system that would bring Africa into the 21st century without the need for more wired connections. But few companies have offered help, without being assured of controlling the system well into the next century.

Barlow: Boy, it really depends on which way you look through the keyhole. In something like six months of traveling around Africa, I've found that microwave communication is being used heavily, and satellite all over the place. More companies than I can count are offering up-link and down-link satellite services on a reasonable basis in Africa.

Jenkins: The issue is not just satellite or cellular for regional connections—it is connection of the continent for interactive local, national, and international communication. Attempts to really connect Africa to the rest of the world are small-scale and of marginal impact on most Africans.

Barlow: I concede that. Currently, to phone one country in Africa from another one you have to route the call through Europe or the U.S.

Jenkins: In other words, you have to route back via the colonial capital.

Barlow: But, already, the telecommunications map of Africa or South America is startlingly different from just a while ago. I mean, three years ago there wasn't an Internet host between Johannesburg and Cairo. Now they're everywhere.

Jenkins: It doesn't take much to establish an Internet host. I agree that Africa can afford systems for smaller-scale cellular, but that kind of connection will not allow economic development. I see the Third World suffering from a kind of digital Darwinism. These countries can never catch up with Moore's Law.

Barlow: Well, I'm of the opinion that it makes better sense for Africa to simply get the voltage of connection to the village, then watch the economic energy build from there. Even the most modest machete-and-loincloth connection to the Internet, broadly distributed, will drive people to fatten that connection.

Jenkins: It's not just access that determines the Internet's economic impact. It's the jobs that result. Let's return to the U.S. In my area of Washington, D.C., we've got one of the most robust, digital, high-tech economies in the country. Some 3,000 employers have generated something like 350,000 jobs. Another 50,000 more jobs go begging. Yet only 1.5% of high-tech employment is in the city of Washington, where the majority population is black and Hispanic. Urban holes in suburban doughnuts characterize high-tech. That situation creates social costs.

Barlow: A lot does need to be done to get corporations' obsolete equipment into the hands of people who can use it.

Jenkins: As one of those working the side of the street where people's demand is not being met...

Barlow: ...I hope one of the things you will do is to increase that demand.

Jenkins: (Laughs.) I've been a drum major from one end of the country to the other. Recently, I tried to get one of the big common carriers to provide full-motion video and two-way interaction so we could have these after-school programs. Nobody would step up to the table.

Barlow: You erred in asking for bigger technology than necessary. One of the things I saw in Africa was efficiency of technology use. Few bells and whistles. The lack caused what use there is to be much more focused.

Jenkins: I'm ready to talk about that. In fact, I'd like to collaborate with you after this conversation and see if we can craft a partial solution to some of the problems we've discussed.

Barlow: I'd love to.