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     North America

This page looks at digital divides in the US and Canada.

It covers -

• introduction
• measures - some key statistics of development and connectivity
• USA - debate about economic and geographical divides
• Canada - a benchmark for Australia?

    introduction

The notion of a 'digital divide' - and later of multiple digital divides - originated along with the internet in the United States. Government characterisation of that divide initially centred on infrastructure, with concerns that some populations did not have access to the digital cornucopia because the infrastructure was not available or was too expensive.

That characterisation was reflected in measures of teledensity (rather than use) and in a range of programs to increase access through for example incentives for infrastructure developers and subsidised access by schools. It was also reflected in private sector initiatives of varying effectiveness, including what one critic slammed as "throw personal computers at the ghetto", and calls for large-scale government intervention.

In December 2008, for example, the Benton Foundation modestly abnnounced that

In a visionary blueprint for the use of technology and innovation, the Benton Foundation proposes that President-Elect Barack Obama take immediate action to connect the nation to broadband, which will unleash billions of dollars in economic development, create over a million jobs, enhance America's global competitiveness, deliver superior health care and education, reduce energy consumption and environmental degradation, improve public safety and homeland security, and reinvigorate democracy.

A more nuanced view of divides - and of the interaction of individual/community expectations about ICT, availability of hardware and the cost of bandwidth - evolved over time. That evolution has seen some government agencies and private sector bodies grappling with intractable challenges, exploiting the divides label as a mechanism for funding fixes or proclaiming that meaningful divides have been bridged.

     measures

As of 2004 population (m) and GDP (US$bn purchasing power parity) for selected states in the Americas was -

State Argentina Belize Bolivia Canada Chile Colombia Costa Rica Cuba Ecuador Panama Paraguay Peru Suriname USA Uruguay

Population 39 0.3 8.7 32 15 42 4 11 13 3 6.1 27 0.4 293 3.4

GDP 435 1.28 21 958 154 263 35 32 45 18 28 146 1.7 10,990 43

Australia's GDP (PPP) was US$571 billion.

An ITU report for 2003 identifies 'main' landlines and aggregate subscribers (landline and mobile) -

state	lines per 100 people	total subscribers (m)
Canada Chile Colombia Costa Rica Cuba Dominican Republic Ecuador El Salvador Grenada Guatemala Guyana Haiti USA Uruguay Venezuela	62.9 23.0 20.0 25.1 3.49 11.5 11.9 11.5 31.6 7.05 9.15 1.57 62.1 27.9 11.2	33.1 9.91 14.9 1.49 0.58 3.00 3.94 1.90 0.04 2.43 0.16 0.27 340 1.59 9.30

and internet hosts (per 10,000 inhabitants) and personal computers (per 100 inhabitants) -

state Antigua Argentina Bahamas Barbados Belize Bolivia Brazil Canada Chile Colombia Costa Rica Cuba Dominican Republic Ecuador El Salvador Grenada Guatemala Guyana Haiti Honduras Jamaica Mexico Nicaragua Panama Paraguay Peru Suriname USA Uruguay Venezuela

hosts 211 200 9 7 88 8 179 1,011 137 26 25 1 82 2 6 1 16 6 3 5 128 13 23 15 24 1 5,549 257 14

PCs 8.20 10.4 12.7 2.28 7.48 48.7 11.9 4.93 19.7 3.18 3.11 2.52 13.2 1.44 2.73 1.36 5.37 8.20 2.79 3.83 3.46 4.30 4.55 65.8 11.0 6.09

The Transparency International 2004 Corruption Perceptions Index ranked selected American states as follows (with Sweden and Australia at 6 and 9 respectively) -

state Canada USA Chile Barbados Uruguay Costa Rica Argentina Ecuador Honduras Venezuela Bolivia Guatemala Haiti

rank 12 17 20 21 28 41 108 112 114 114 122 122 145

The UNDP report for 2004 suggested that life expectancy at birth and adult literacy (%, ages 15 plus) was -

state Canada Chile Colombia Guyana Haiti USA Uruguay Venezuela

expectancy 79 76 72 63 49 77 75 73

literacy 100 95 92 96 51 100 97 94

     the USA

Under the Clinton administration the US government established a Digital Divide office to deal with policy questions and awareness at the national level. Amid comments that 'The Divide' no longer exists or is no longer important that office's site went offline. However, it is available on the Internet Archive and the various Falling Through the Net reports are available here, along with the NTIA Networked Nation: Broadband in America 2007 (PDF) report.

Other reports include Robert Kominski & Eric Newburger's 1999 Access Denied: Changes in Computer Ownership and Use: 1984-1997 (PDF); the US Census Bureau offers data on personal computer ownership (PDF). As in other advanced economies responsibility for divide initiatives has spread across the bureaucracy.

The Benton Foundation has established the Digital Divide Network (DDN) as a nongovernment resource for US initiatives and issues.

As we note in the Metrics & Statistics, Economy and Digital Environment guides, the Divide has been a major preoccupation of US state and federal government agencies. The federal Department of Commerce (DOC) and national Telecommunications & Information Administration (NTIA) reports on Falling Through The Net provide a detailed picture of who is online, analysing the 'telecommunications and information technology gap in America'.

A point of reference is the 2004 Brookings Institution study by Scott Allard on Access to Social Services: The Changing Urban Geography of Poverty and Service Provision (PDF), noting that location matters: poor populations in urban centers have greater spatial access to social services than poor populations living in suburban areas and rural areas.

The October 2000 Falling Through The Net: Towards Digital Inclusion report (PDF) concentrates on "access to technology tools", measuring the extent of digital inclusion by identifying households and individuals with a computer and internet connection. It has been superseded by the 2004 A Nation Online: Entering the Broadband Age report from the NTIA. 

The State of the Net 2000 report is a snapshot by the US Internet Council (USIC) of access, ecommerce, traffic and other Internet statistics. While some of the figures are suspect, the report is a useful compilation. USIC's 1999 report is also online.

It should be read in conjunction with studies such as the 2000 report by Donna Hoffman & Thomas Novak on The Evolution of the Digital Divide: Examining the Relationship of Race to Internet Access & Usage Over Time (PDF), the Deconstructing the Digital Divide in the United States: An Interpretive Policy Analytic Perspective paper by Christina Courtright & Alice Robbin and the 2002 paper by Beverly Lynch on The Digital Divide or the Digital Connection: A U.S. Perspective. Lynch echoes Pippa Norris's superb Digital Divide: Civic Engagement, Information Poverty & the Internet Worldwide (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 2001) in noting that the term "becomes a shorthand for every conceivable disparity relating to online access".

Among government initiatives are programs of the Federal-State Joint Board on Universal Service (UService) and the E-rate (Schools & Libraries Universal Service Support Mechanism), a levy on internet consumers.

Consumers contribute roughly US$1 per month to the E-rate program, which has distributed nearly US$13 billion to libraries and schools since 1998 as discounts for telecommunications services. Proponents argue that as of 2001 some 87% of all classrooms in public schools have net access, including 81% of all classrooms in schools with a minority enrollment of greater than 49%. As of 2002 about 95% of all public libraries provide public internet access.

At a global level the October 2000 conference in Seattle (of course) of the Digital Dividend Organisation (DDO) noted that there are more telephones in New York City than in all of rural Asia, more internet accounts in London than all of Africa. As much as 80% of the world's population has never made a phone call. The net connects 100 million computers, but that "represents less than 2% of the world's population".

Around the same time the US Consumers Federation of America and Consumers Union released their Disconnected, Disadvantaged & Disenfranchised report (PDF), based on a detailed national survey of 1900 respondents and claimed to present

the first direct comparison of a broad range of commercial, informational, educational, civic and political activities of individuals in physical space to those in cyberspace.

For a contrarian view US business group the Employment Policy Foundation (EPF) blithely says "where's the beef?" in a January 2001 report (PDF).

It predicts that "the Divide" will disappear of its own accord by 2009, with almost all upper income households and 95% of lower income households owning computers. Some of the more challenging questions of use and access costs are skated over; as noted throughout this site ownership of a personal computer does not necessarily equate with information literacy or a low-cost internet connection.

The Packard Foundation's 2001 Children & Computer Technology report for example notes that 70% of US households with children aged 2 to 17 have computers. 52% have an internet connection, although only a small propertion have broadband and charges vary considerably. Only 22% of very low income households have computers, compared to 91% of upper income households.

One response is ConnectNet, an internet directory that identifies 20,000 'technology access points', 'community technology centers' (aka telecentres) and libraries that offer free connections to the net.

The openNET Coalition, an alliance of ISPs, is

dedicated to promoting the rights of all consumers to obtain affordable, high-speed access to the Internet from the provider of their choice ... competition among Internet service providers over last mile broadband networks will lower prices, spur innovation, and advance the social and economic benefits of the internet.

The Beehive.org is one of the less grandiose, and perhaps more effective, local initiatives.

Some demographics have remained offline. In May 2008 for example Parks Associates claimed that roughly one-fifth of all US "heads-of-household" have never used email, claiming that its annual phone survey found 20 million households (c18% of all US households, down from 29% in 2006) are without internet access and that nearly one out of three heads has "never used a computer to create a document". 50% of those who have never used email are over 65; 56% had no schooling beyond high school. 7% of the 'disconnected' households planned to subscribe to an internet service within the next 12 months.

The 1999 report by James Casey, Randy Ross & Marcia Warren Native Networking: Telecommunications & Information Technology in Indian Country remains of value, as does The Native Digital Divide: A Review of Online Literature (NDD) by Evans Craig. Another perspective is offered by Mark Warschauer's paper (PDF) on Dissecting the Digital Divide and the 2001 paper An Empirical Investigation of the Digital Divide in the United States (txt) by Danilo Pelletiere & Chris Rodrigo, the latter echoing work by Matthew Zook.

Reports and studies include Anthony Wilhelm's First Monday article They Threw Me A Computer ... But What I Really Needed Was A Life Preserver and Anne Craig's article Bridging the Digital Divide: State Government As Content Provider - The Illinois Experience.

In 2004 President Bush - in one of his more opaque speeches - called for "universal, affordable access to broadband technology by the year 2007". Estimates of the cost of providing broadband infrastructure are upwards of US$20 billion, with around US$10 billion for all un wired homes in urban or suburban areas and another US$10 billion to "DSL-enable rural America".

Proponents highlight the need for incentives to commercial connectivity providers. Those incentives for example might include a massive subsidy in the form of a tax break or a Universal Service Fund fee added to all broadband service (modelled on the 1934 USF), with urban consumers paying for infrastructure upgrades in the rural US.

Broader economic and cultural disparities are explored in Unequal Chances: Family Background and Economic Success (Princeton: Princeton Uni Press 2005), edited by Samuel Bowles, Herbert Gintis & Melissa Groves and Inequality Matters: The Growing Economic Divide in America and Its Poisonous Consequences (New York: Demos/New Press 2006) edited by James Lardner & David Smith.

     Canada

Two starting points for considering digital divides in Canada are the Connecting Canadians gateway, a federal government initiative, and the National Broadband Task Force site.

In June 2001 the Task Force released its detailed The New National Dream: Networking the Nation for Broadband Access report, which characterises broadband as

the transcontinental railway of the new millennium. Just like the railroads, it bridges the geographic distances of the vast country in which we live to connect Canadians to each other

The report called for investment of C$4 billion to deploy broadband to all Canadians by 2004. That investment was initially embraced by the federal government and then quietly abandoned.

In 2005 a small-scale survey by Solutions Research Group led to claims that 49% of Canadian households are connected via broadband, compared to 34% in the US. 63% of Canadian households were supposedly on the net, compared to 57% of US households, with the percentage of Canadian broadband homes increasing from 31% in 2003 to 40% in 2004 and 49% in 2005. Supposedly 25% of Canadian users in the 12-29 age group had downloaded a full-length movie or a 30/60-minute television program, compared to 16% of US users in the same cohort.

William Birdsall's provocative 2000 First Monday paper on The Digital Divide in the Liberal State: a Canadian Perspective argues that divides will not be cured through market or government intervention, as they are an integral part of "North American social welfare policy".

There is a somewhat more positive account in The Dual Digital Divide: The Information Highway in Canada (PDF), a distance learning study from the same year, in the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Road Map report and in the CA*Net Institute's 2001 A nation goes online (PDF).

The Canada West Foundation (CWF) published two reports on Canadian Free-Nets: At A Crossroad on the Information Highway (Crossroad) and Surveying the Landscape on the Info Highway (SLIH). Vincent Mosco's report Public Policy & the Information Highway: Access, Equity & Universality remains of value.



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