ation connected, followed by Norway
(23%) and Iceland (22.7%). The United States is in fourth place with 20%. Eleven
countries in the world have a proportion of Internet users above 10%, and
Switzerland is eleventh, with 10.7%.

Regarding the global percentage, the statistics of end 1997 of the Computer
Industry Almanach - which take into consideration the connections at home, at
work and in academic institutions - show that the United States is still
considerably ahead with 54.68% of the global percentage, followed by Japan
(7.97%), the United Kingdom (5.83%) and Canada (4.33%). The survey also shows
that the US lead is constantly decreasing - it went from 80% in 1991 to less
than 65% in 1994, with prospects of 50% in 1998 and less than 40% in 2000.

Nevertheless, if we consider the whole planet, universal access to information
highways is far from the reality. Regarding basic telephony, teledensity varies
from more than 60 phone lines per 100 inhabitants in the richest countries to
less than one in the poorest countries. Fifty per cent of phone lines in the
world are in northern America and western Europe. Half of the world's population
has never used a phone.

In the developing countries, it is unlikely that Internet connections will use
traditional phone lines, as there are other technological solutions. The
developing countries' equipment rate for digital lines is equivalent to the rate
of industrialized countries. The growth in mobile telephony is also spectacular.
The solution could be brought by cellular radiotelephony and satellite
connection.

However, the demarcation between the "info-rich" and the "info-poor" does not
systematically follow the demarcation between the so-called developed and
developing countries. Access to information technology in the so-called rich
countries is also rather uneven. Some developing countries, such as Malaysia or
a number of countries in Latin America, have a very dynamic telecommunication
policy. In the documents prepared for the second Conference on the Development
of Telecommunications in the World, organized by the International
Telecommunication Union (ITU) from March 23 to April 1, 1998 in Valletta, Malta,
it was stated that several developing countries, such as Botswana, China, Chile,
Thailand, Hungary, Ghana and Mauritius, succeeded in extending the density and
the quality of their phone services during the last three years. On the other
hand, the situation was gettin