In 2007 the bottom three-quarters of the world’s population included about 30 percent of the people who have Internet access. The 2020 scenario proposed to survey respondents that this number will rise to 50 percent. Participants agreed that mobile communications devices—most of them not yet Internet-connected—have made an amazing impact already and will continue to bridge the digital divide and promote digital inclusion. Geert Lovink wrote, “We now still look at the world from a 'digital divide' perspective, but that will soon be of little use. The massive use by the 'emerging' underclasses of the 'Global South' of mobile phones should be interpreted as a necessity of the labour force to gain mobility in order to increase their output.”
Charles Kenny, senior economist for the World Bank, the international aid agency, commented, “The mobile phone will be used for an increasing range of services such as m-banking in developing countries, but it will also remain key as a tool for voice communication. For around a quarter of the world's population still officially illiterate (and many more functionally illiterate), voice telephony will remain the primary means of communicating over distance.” An anonymous survey participant added, “Voice communication is the most common method used by humans to communicate, and devices with voice capabilities will be key.”
Jonne Soininen, Internet Engineering Task Force and Internet Society leader and manager of Internet affairs for Nokia Siemens Network, added, “In many places having fixed infrastructure is not possible either physically or economically, thus, making mobile systems the viable option for Internet access.”
Active Internet Society and ICANN participant Cheryl Langdon-Orr said she takes issue with the figure of 50 percent of the world being connected, and she hopes for more. “Mobile device connectivity to the Internet is indeed a cost-effective e-future vision for many,” she wrote, “but in my utopia where the Internet Society states ‘The Internet is for Everyone’ we would be looking at much more than 50 percent of people being online by 2020.”
And Sudip Aryal, president of the Nepal Rural Information Technology Development Society, wrote, “to meet this target of 50 percent or even more than that, each and every country should make ICT as a national-priority issue. Just like the awareness of HIV/AIDS and use of condoms, the national and international bodies must launch a program to aware about the ‘importance of Internet in one's life’ to the grass root communities.”
Michael Botein, a telecommunications law expert at New York University and consultant to the Federal Communications Commission, said improved, affordable mobile technology could help pave the way to a friendlier world. “It is difficult to foresee a future short of a technological breakthrough in which mobile technology will have enough bandwidth to provide data services, real-time video, and the like,” he wrote. “On a positive note, however, cellular will allow the beginnings of universal service in most parts of the world—as already in Latin America and Africa—and thus may help break down long-held hostilities.”
Several respondents, including Neil McIntosh, director of editorial development for the top news site guardian.co.uk, based in London, said, “a greater and more fundamental problem, however, may be poor literacy and continued widespread poverty, which technology by itself can't solve.”