It is often said of the internet that Content is King: but it is not true. Access is king, because without access there can no content. The growing worry is that the internet, despite genuine government initiatives both here and in the US, will continue to be disproportionately rich, white and middle class.
The bare statistics of the digital divide are now fairly well known. In Britain, according to a recent Guardian/ICM poll, 59% of the most affluent AB social group have internet access compared with only 14% of the poorest DE classes, which include the unskilled. In America white people are much more likely to have a household computer than African-Americans (44.2% compared with 29.0%) though, interestingly, the gap at work is much less pronounced.
Long before Francis Bacon coined the phrase "Knowledge is power", quick access to information endowed the recipient with a comparative advantage. The arrival of an information society turns it from an advantage into a necessity. Speed of access to information - whether share prices, new scientific research or news - is more vital than ever.
And in the information age you need not only knowledge of facts but also knowledge of the skills that produce the knowledge industry, because most new jobs require them. Within these trends, subtler changes are taking place. For instance, circles of those with privileged knowledge are widening at the expense of those outside them. In pre-web days, for instance, only an elite circle of people had access to insider knowledge and analysis in the City.
Now, thanks to the proliferation of financial web sites with instant (and usually free) access to share prices, charts, analysis and instant gossip, the insider circle has greatly increased. But the gap between those in the loop and those outside it is widening, especially as knowledge itself becomes the source of competitive advantage.
The digital revolution has opened up a new divide within existing workforces. Older workers (over 40s these days) find that, suddenly, youth is preferred over experience, and stored knowledge is devalued, counting for nothing because of the cultural revolution within the new companies. Suddenly, twenty-somethings are running their own companies instead of being corporate cogs in a bigger machine.
A new kind of divide is also opening up as a result of the changing relationship between capital and labour. As Professor John Kay has pointed out, the capital market is no longer there to provide capital for the development of the business but to enable people who dream up new ideas for new businesses to get the benefits as quickly as possible. If this succeeds then it will open up yet another financial divide in society.
Judging by the rate at which new dot.com companies have been falling in recent months, though, it could have the opposite effect.
No one is more outside the loop than developing countries. When you read of the amazing electronic markets that are being constructed to harness the deflationary powers of the web and bring down the prices of raw materials and commodities, remember who is at the other end of the chain. Almost certainly it will be a developing country which was already suffering from the decline of its main source of income (commodities), even before the success of the internet.
There has also been a big switch of equity and investment capital from developing countries to the hi-tech markets of the booming internet economies - though the way the market has collapsed suggests that much of that capital may have had a higher return if it had been left in the Third World.
It is not only wrong but counter-productive to allow the Third World to fall even further behind. As Hasso Plattner, co-chief executive of SAP AG, the German software firm, told the World Economic Forum this year: "The more the [developing nations] can be members of this digital society, it will help us to trade with them, and then live in a more prosperous world" This is a double tragedy because, unlike previous revolutions, the internet is capable not only of narrowing the gap between the knowledge-rich and -poor but also the speed at which that happens.
The industrial revolution started 200 years ago but its ripples have yet to reach huge areas of the world - especially in Africa. No one ever had an economic incentive to build high capacity telephone lines to homes in remote parts of Africa because the cost of constructing landlines is prohibitive. And the village, being its own network, had probably had no desire for wider communications.
Remember, most people in the world have yet to make a telephone call, and more than 90% of all computers are in the developed countries. Wireless technologies are now available (the satellites are already passing overhead) that could enable African countries to leapfrog the industrial revolution into the information age. That ought to be the prime concern of the World Bank. But it is not happening.
The fruits of the information revolution are going disproportionately to those who are already in the loop. A new underclass is being created in developing countries - and within developed ones - from which it will be even more difficult to escape. The internet started life as a mutual society, but it was a mutual society for those who could afford to be in the know.
Unlike physical wealth, units of information can be distributed without any extra cost. But the problem of providing affordable access to enable poor people to make use of all the "free" knowledge has not yet been solved.
