New technologies and the global race for knowledge

but achieving that potential depends on how technology is used. What is technology’s impact on globalization and globalization’s impact on technology?

The Internet, the world wide computer link-up, is "the fastest-growing tool of communication ever," with the number of users expected to grow from 150 million today to more than 700 million in 2001. Information and communications technology are tremendous tools for development and can open a fast track to knowledge-based growth, a track followed by India’s software programming, Ireland’s computing services and the Caribbean’s data processing. But many of those who most need access cannot obtain it. An invisible barrier has emerged that, "true to its name, is like a world wide web, embracing the connected and silently, almost imperceptibly, excluding the rest." The United States has more computers than the rest of the world combined. Bulgaria has more Internet hosts than the whole of sub-Saharan Africa, excluding South Africa. South Asia, with 23 per cent of the world’s people, has less than one per cent of the world’s Internet users. Everywhere, Internet access divides educated from illiterate (60 per cent of users in China have a university degree), men from women (in Brazil, 75 per cent of users are men), rich from poor (a computer costs the average Bangladeshi more than eight years’income, compared with one month’s wage for the average American), young from old (the average British user is under 30) and urban from rural. "The typical Internet user world wide is male, under 35 years old, with a university education and high income, urban based and English speaking a member of a very elite minority". English is used in almost 80 per cent of websites. Yet fewer than one in 10 people world wide speaks the language. The literally well connected have an overpowering advantage over the unconnected poor, whose voices and concerns are being left out of the global conversation.

Market forces alone will not rectify the imbalance. Governance of the Internet should be widened to bring in the needs and concerns of developing countries. A second race to lay claim to knowledge, particularly in biotechnology, has been sparked by the privatization of research and development, market liberalization and the tightening of intellectual property rights. As with global communications, "the risk is that poor people’s and poor countries’ interests are being left on the sidelines."

Huge corporations are controlling ever-growing shares of the global market. The top 10 telecommunications corporations held 86 per cent of the market in 1998. In pesticides, the top 10’s share was 85 per cent; computers, almost 70 per cent; veterinary medicine, 60 per cent; pharmaceuticals, 35 per cent; commercial seed, 32 per cent. Patents, too, are concentrated, with industrialized countries holding 97 per cent of all patents world wide.

Recommendations include:

• a shift of research towards the needs of the world, rather than just of those who pay. Area of biotechnology research important here. The establishment of a group of independent scientists to identify technological problems that, if solved, would contribute to human development, particularly of the world’s poorest people, and to human security. Every five years the group would offer money and recognition to researchers in areas such as robust new crops, malaria and HIV vaccines, solar-powered or wind-up computers, and renewable energy sources. Funding could be provided by a levy on patents or from a reallocation of research subsidies, grants and tax breaks currently given to industry
• a review of the intellectual property rights agreement under the World Trade Organization, to cover the viewpoints of developing countries and the knowledge of indigenous peoples
• funding to major the Internet a globally accesible and globally governed service. Funded through a "bit tax" on data sent through the Internet. A tax of one US cent on every 100 lengthy e-mails would generate well over $70 billion a year

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Paper is one chapter from the 1999 UNDP Human Development Report