U.S. and only a few other nations (1997, 118). The growth of Internet usage has been faster in the U.S. than in other countries, perhaps because it is something that is appealing to the journalists, scholars, executives and others in the class of those who set opinions (Herman & McChesney 1997, 118). Those with the hardware and software necessary to work within the Internet tend to be of the classes with higher income. Theoretically, if people all over the world used the Internet for all their daily communication and commerce, severe bottlenecks would occur. Bill Gates says that low-cost interactive bandwidth is going to come very slowly, requiring hundreds of billions of dollars to provide broadband capacity for the entire world (Herman & McChesney 1997, 119). It is uncertain who would pay for such access.
The political and economic ramifications of differences in Internet availability have been commented on by others. Castells sees that a global economy, the type of economy that is potentially available with current technology, is not a pla
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