国際大学グローバル・コミュニケーション・センター

Closing the Horizontal Digital Divide
Shumpei Kumon
Executive Director
Center for Global Communications, International University of Japan
October 2, 2000
Many speeches delivered at the UN's millennium assembly suggest that world leaders are becoming aware of and are trying to cope with what has been widely called the "digital divide" between nations, between north and south, and between ethnic groups.
We might call this a "vertical digital divide." But there is another digital divide that is perhaps more important to close: the "horizontal digital divide" between social entities who are more or less equal in power if seen in the vertical dimension, but who differ greatly in levels of empowerment when examined horizontally.
For example, some intellectually empowered dot.com companies insist that they have the right to sell to third parties the personal information of customers collected during electronic commerce transactions. Yet these same companies resist efforts by consumers to use software agents to collect information from websites without leaving personal identity data. Similarly, some consumers fighting to keep their personal information protected see no problem with freely sharing and downloading copyrighted entertainment materials.……全文はこちら（PDF）